Quotes from Ellen J. Langer

The hefty price for accepting information uncritically is that we go through life unaware that what we've accepted as impossible may in fact be quite possible.

It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits.

Mindfulness can encourage creativity when the focus is on the process and not the product.

Social psychologists argue that who we are at any one time depends mostly on the context in which we find ourselves. But who creates the context? The more mindful we are, the more we can create the contexts we are in. When we create the context, we are more likely to be authentic. Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change.

If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.

When people are depressed they tend to believe they are depressed all the time. Mindful attention to variability shows this is not the case,

Our life is what our thoughts make it. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The more we realize that most of our views of ourselves, of others, and of presumed limits regarding our talents, our health, and our happiness were mindlessly accepted by us at an earlier time in our lives, the more we open up to the realization that these too can change. And all we need do to begin the process is to be mindful.

If we examine what is behind our desires, we can usually get what we want without compromising: love, caring, confidence, respectability, excitement. Compromising is necessary only if what we want is in short supply.

It is by logic that we prove. It is by intuition that we discover," said the mathematician Henri Poincare.l

By mindfully considering data not as stable commodities but as sources of ambiguity, we become more observant.

Work/life integration seems to me a better goal than balance. Balance suggests that our lives are in two parts. The more mindful we are, the less we compartmentalize our lives.

We simply don't know, which is why scientific research is an almost constant search for better truths and not "the truth.

Helping feels good to the helper, but over time it may make the helped feel incompetent. Dr.

In combating prejudice, then, the issue is not simply how we might teach the majority to be less judgmental, but also how we might all learn to value a "disabled" or "deviant" person's more creative perceptions.

Second-order mindfulness recognizes that there is no right answer. Decision making is independent of data gathering.

The successful leader may be the person who recognizes that we all have talents and who thus sees her or his main job as encouraging mindfulness in those being led.

Out of time we cut "days" and "nights," "summers" and "winters." We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. —William James, "The World We Live In

Mindfulness involves two key strategies for improving health: attention to context and attention to variability.

Instead I invite you to consider why you laughed at a joke the last time you did. If the punch line made you realize that the story could be understood in a way other than how you first heard it, you have experienced a moment of mindfulness.

mindful approach to any activity has three characteristics: the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective

Regardless of how we get there, either through meditation or more directly by paying attention to novelty and questioning assumptions, to be mindful is to be in the present, noticing all the wonders that we didn't realize were right in front of us.

This ability to transcend context is the essence of mindfulness and central to creativity in any field.

Changing of contexts, as we've seen in earlier chapters, generates imagination and creativity as well as new energy.