Mindfulness Quotes

“When people are depressed they tend to believe they are depressed all the time. Mindful attention to variability shows this is not the case,”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“Mindfulness can encourage creativity when the focus is on the process and not the product.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change. When we feel locked into strict work procedures and rules, we can recognize that these were once decisions made by certain individuals. These people lived at a particular point in history, with particular biases and needs. If we realized this, more of us would consider redesigning our work to fit our skills and lives.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“It is by logic that we prove. It is by intuition that we discover," said the mathematician Henri Poincare.l”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“Our life is what our thoughts make it. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“Second-order mindfulness recognizes that there is no right answer. Decision making is independent of data gathering.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“This ability to transcend context is the essence of mindfulness and central to creativity in any field.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“Mindfulness involves two key strategies for improving health: attention to context and attention to variability.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“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.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“William James claimed that almost all of us use only the tiniest fraction of our potential.11 Only under certain circumstances of constructive stress or in certain states—great love, for example, or religious ardor, or the courage of battle—do we begin to tap the depth and richness of our creative resources, or the tremendous reserves of life energy that lie sleeping within us.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“If we describe someone we dislike intensely, a single state-ment usually does it. But if, instead, we are forced to describe the person in great detail, eventually there will be some quality we appreciate.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“The way we first take in information (that is, mindfully or mindlessly) determines how we will use it later.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“in a society concerned primarily with process, the notion of deviance might have much less, if any, significance.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“Changing of contexts, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, generates imagination and creativity as well as new energy.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“It may be in our best interest to proceed as though these and other abilities might be improved upon, so that at least we will not be deterred by false limits.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“One day, at a nursing home in Connecticut, elderly residents were each given a choice of houseplants to care for and were asked to make a number of small decisions about their daily routines. A year and a half later, not only were these people more cheerful, active, and alert than a similar group in the same institution who were not given these choices and responsibilities, but many more of them were still alive. In fact, less than half as many of the decision-making, plant-minding residents had died as had those in the other group.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“The Medusa and the Snail,”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“Florida Scott-Maxwell, a Jungian analyst who did
not begin her training until midlife, began writing a private notebook at the age of eighty-two, in which she recorded her impressions of old age. Her experiences, mindfully observed, did not fit her expectations: "Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate.... To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction." I I”
― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness