Positive Psychology:
Happiness, Work
and the Psychology of
Optimal Experience
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes a life worth living?”
Download Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Finding Flow”
Quotations by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
“A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.”
“As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.”
“Entropy is the normal state of consciousness – a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.”
“It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.”
“People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.”
“There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.”
Erich Fromm’s take on the “Marketing Orientation”
Download Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving”
Quotations by Erich Fromm:
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. ”
“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. ”
“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. ”
“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. ”
“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. ”
“Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. ”
“The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. ”
“The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. ”
“There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail. ”
“There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. ”
“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. ”
“Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? “
