Flow Quotes

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The river is everywhere.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“Fire wants to burn
Water wants to flow
Air wants to rise
Earth wants to bind
Chaos wants to devour
Cal wants to live”
― Cassandra Clare, The Iron Trial

“The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.”
― Richard Rohr

“Always ask yourself: "What will happen if I say nothing?”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“The day we decide to drop the flimsy makeshift scenarios in our cluttered mind and eschew the ‘alleluias’ of self-importance, life can become genuine, lucid and graceful, like a flow of wellness in the glow of a new morning. ("Words flew away like birds")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Let’s not wait until the light fades into irreparable loss, but let’s stay in the loop and pursue the momentous flow of daily little wonders, since life kindly tenders us gorgeous bouquets of sparkling colors, telling signs and rousing episodes. (“Côté cour…Côté jardin”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Happiness is a flow between a playful construction and a painful deconstruction, undulating from a hampering past into a liberating 'now,' escorting a meandering flood of twists and turns, caressing the velvet sand of dreamy beaches or smashing sometimes into the rocks of reality. ("New York at arm's length of desire")”
― Erik Pevernagie, Words of Wisdom: Selected and illustrated by his readers

“When rain and tears are making a trip together, emotions can be coming under pressure. But the fluid bond between the power of nature and the frailty of the soul may also smash the weight of the burden and create a liberating mental flow opening new insights. (“Rainman”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Let us join the flow of ethereal vibrations when love is at our fingertips and encounter the mystery and wonder of unsuspected instants. Let us dip into the marvel of the budding and the blooming spray of our dreams brightening up our path. ("Crystallization under an umbrella")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Our “identity” may fascinate us because it ensures continuity throughout time, as we discern it from external signs, tuition, or heritage. When inner tensions run out of control, though, it can be that our “character” exceeds all boundaries. If we succeed in mastering the pressure that destroys the ramparts of our inner world, we can create a pattern, a way of living, that molds the outlines of our identity, combining the unavoidable daily “musts” with the fluency of the enlightening unsuspected “moments,” allowing us to soar on the flow of the soothing waves of our vibrating feelgood experience. ("Looking for the unexpected")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“Let us people 'be' as they are, authentic, floundering on the flow of rippling moments, simmering in their juice. Why should we expect them to build up a house of cards crumbling down behind a curtain of appearances? Why keep bending backward every time, suffering unbearable torments and distressful heartbeats? Why inflame people to focus on cringy living standards with a hell's race of illusions? - Erik Pevernagie”
― Erik Pevernagie, The rabbit hole of Meditation: The author’s reflections selected and illustrated by his readers

“The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.”
― Csikszentmihaly

“Basic Principles:

1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy.

2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life -- including ourselves.

3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator's creativity within us and our lives.

4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.

5. Creativity is God's gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.

6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature.

7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction.

8. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.

9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.

10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.”
― Julia Cameron

“If you have a good idea, use it so that you will not only accomplish something, but so that you can make room for new ones to flow into you.”
― Deng Ming-Dao, Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony

“May the river of love always flow from its own lap.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Spend more time doing things that make you forget about the time.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Katsa watched the long grass moving around them. The wind pushed it, attacked it, struck it in one place and then another. It rose and fell and rose again. It flowed, like water.”
― Kristin Cashore, Graceling

“Life is not measured by time. It is measured by moments.”
― Armin Houman

“Flattery does not encourage the perfect flow of love in the vein of your relationship. Be genuine and speak out what you feel for each other without hiding the painful truth.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Life is a dance between heaven and earth, the ebb and flow of life.”
― Maurice Spees

“I take showers to think.”
― J.R. Rim

“When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?"

That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."

In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art.

The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work.

In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, "Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).”
― Ariel Gore, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness

“Be like water,

Flow like a river,

Crash like the rain,

Fly like the cloud again!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“Your call to power is to slow down and reflect within. Gather the peace within yourself before you go out and act among the world. The feel good feeling that lasts is only achieved when you yourself know peace. Nothing is more powerful. This is why you have the highs and lows, the mood swings, the transcendent ecstasy followed by the crash. It is because you have yet to develop a foundation of peace for yourself that acts as an unmovable anchor in your life. Establish this peace in your life and you will experience a whole new reality of the world that flows with you in every way possible, rather than against you.”
― Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life

“Everything and everyone at their own pace. Flow with not against yourself.”
― Akiroq Brost