Quotes About Fulfillment

The same is true of all flow experiences: there is a mutual relationship between goals and the effort they require. Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal. One gets married because the spouse seems worthy of sharing one's life with, but unless one then behaves as if this is true, the partnership will appear to lose value with time. All

Nosotros siempre estamos luchando por vivir –solía decir Ralph Waldo Emerson–, pero nunca vivimos.»

Leisure that uses up external resources, however, often requires less attention, and as a consequence it generally provides less memorable rewards.

Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. The

Almost any kind of feedback can be enjoyable, provided it is logically related to a goal in which one has invested psychic energy. If

One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment. Compared

In the past few centuries economic rationality has een so successful that we have come to take for granted that the "bottom line" of any human effort is to be measured in dollars and cents. But an exclusively economic approach to life is profoundly irrational; the true bottom line consists in the quality and complexity of experience

What would really satisfy people is not getting slim or rich, but feeling good about their lives. In the quest for happiness, partial solutions don't work.

Shaping one's own reality, living in a world one has created, can be as enjoyable as writing a symphony. No

And the reality is that the quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.

To gain personal control over the quality of experience, however, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.

I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness.

in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life—

Ask yourself whether you are happy," said J. S. Mill, "and you cease to be so." It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

Instead of feeling oppressed by the necessity to work hard, they share the opinion of Giuliana B., a seventy-four-year-old lady: "I am free, free in my work, because I do whatever I want. If I don't do something today I will do it tomorrow. I don't have a boss, I am the boss of my own life. I have kept my freedom and I have fought for my freedom." Certainly

The other danger in becoming involved with culinary delights—and here again the parallels with sex are obvious—is that they can become addictive. It

When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They

But whatever the dictates of fashion, it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do live a happier life.

We are always getting to live," as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, "but never living." Or as poor Frances learned in the children's story, it is always bread and jam tomorrow, never bread and jam today.

humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.

In each person's life, the chances of only good things happening are extremely slim. The likelihood that our desires will be always fulfilled is so minute as to be negligible.

When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable.

What matters is not what he has now, but what he might obtain if he does as others want him to do. Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands.