"Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things. Adults, themselves often deluded by infatuation with fatuous models, conspire in the deceptio..."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
"After curiosity, this quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart in college from their peers. Without this quality, they could not have ..."
"Creative people are constantly surprised. They don’t assume that they understand what is happening around them, and they don’t assume that anybody else does either. They question the obvious—not out o..."
"A large majority of our respondents were inspired by a tension in their domain that became obvious when looked at from the perspective of another domain. Even though they do not think of themselves as..."
"The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings."--(psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls "flow")"
"All our contemporaries...had some big ideology to live for. Everybody thought he had to either fight in Spain or die for something else, and most of us had to be in prison for one reason or another. A..."
"In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhea..."
"Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be reca..."
"To keep up interest in a subject, a teenager has to enjoy working in it. If the teacher makes the task of learning excessively difficult, the student will feel too frustrated and anxious to really get..."
"Few would argue that a simpler consciousness, no matter how harmonious, is preferable to a more complex one. While we might admire the serenity of the lion in repose, the tribesman’s untroubled accept..."