This article contains thirty-six Eat Pray Love quotes from the book and film.

Elizabeth Gilbert was 36 years old when Eat Pray Love was published. She had, by then, segmented her memoir into three parts – Eat in Italy, Pray in India, and Love in Indonesia – with 36 anecdotes in each (108 tales total). The idea was pulled from japa mala, a loop of 108 prayer beads that drape around three fingers and smell softly of sandalwood when you hold them close to your heart. 

As each bead is thumbed through, a mantra is recited. As you thumb through Eat Pray Love, you’ll hear Gilbert’s mantra loud and clear too: I. This was a year for herself and only herself, draped in the pleasures of food in Rome (and Naples), solitude in an ashram hours outside of Mumbai, and time with a healer in Bali. 

Gilbert indulges her every want and desire, and in doing so, delivers a permission slip for others to do the same, to admit how much they love to travel, to soul-search without apology, and to ask themselves the questions Gilbert asks herself in Eat Pray Love.  

“And the question now for me is, What are my choices to be? What do I believe that I deserve in this life? Where can I accept sacrifice, and where can I not?”

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

Eat Pray Love was our second travel book club pick, after Wild by Cheryl Strayed. So, I annotated this memoir a while ago, wrote down all the quotable lines from the book, watched the movie (where Julia Roberts plays Elizabeth Gilbert), and wrote down all the quotable lines from the film. 

Here are those lines (and Italian phrases, as Gilbert mentions many she admires for their beauty). Here are 36 (to stay on theme) Eat Pray Love book quotes and movie quotes about travel, food, and self-discovery.

36 Eat Pray Love Quotes

• “Traveling is the great true love of my life.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “Cocktails? Dancing? Piles of pork? Of course, I’ll come.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

• “We all want to speak Italian because we love the way it makes us feel.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “This is a sweet expression. Bel far niente means ‘the beauty of doing nothing’.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “There’s another wonderful Italian expression: l’arte d’arrangiarsi – the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few simple ingredients into a feast, or a few gathered friends into a festival.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “We just learned the other day that un’amica stretta means ‘a close friend.’ But stretta literally means tight, as in clothing, like a tight skirt. So a close friend, in Italian, is one that you can wear tightly, snug against your skin.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

• “So far, though, my favorite thing to say in all of Italian is a simple, common word: Attraversiamo. It means, ‘Let’s cross over.’”- Elizabeth Gilbert
• “Parla come magni…It means, ‘Speak the way you eat,’ or, in my personal translation: ‘Say it like you eat it.’ It’s a reminder when you’re searching for the right words – to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman food. Don’t make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “I’m in love. I’m having a relationship with my pizza.” – Eat Pray Love (2010)
• “I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

• “Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.” – Giovanni 
• “Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.” – Giovanni
• “Dear me, how I love a library.” – Elizabeth Gilbert 
• “I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

• “I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.” – Eat Pray Love (2010)

• “You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.” – Richard from Texas
• “Your ego’s job isn’t to serve you. Its only job is to keep itself in power.” – Richard from Texas
• “Here’s what you gotta understand, Groceries. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using right now to obsess about this guy, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with the doorway? It will rush in – God will rush in – and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed.” – Richard from Texas
• “Love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.” – Felipe

• “To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs instead of two.” – Ketut Liyer
• “You must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.” – Ketut Liyer
• “Sometimes to lose balance for love is part of living a balanced life.” – Eat Pray Love (2010)
• “You learn to smile even in your liver?” – Ketut Liyer

• “Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people’s thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be – that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city then you don’t really belong there.” – Giulio 
• “The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “I’m sick of people telling me that I need a man. ‘You don’t need a man, Liz. You need a champion.'” – Eat Pray Love (2010)

• “Oh, Lord – responsibility. That word worked on me until I worked on it, until I looked at it carefully and broke it down into the two words that make its true definition: the ability to respond.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “And the question now for me is, What are my choices to be? What do I believe that I deserve in this life? Where can I accept sacrifice, and where can I not?” – Elizabeth Gilbert
• “In the end, I’ve come to believe in something I call The Physics Of The Quest. A force in nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity. The rule of Quest Physics goes something like this. If you’re brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.” – Eat Pray Love (2010)
• “I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

Did you enjoy these Eat Pray Love quotes? What are your favorite quotes from Eat Pray Love? Let me know in the comments below!