Optimal experience is that rare occasion when we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

For better or worse, our future will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.

Flow is 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.

A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.

And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.

If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.

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

Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not 'wasting time.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.

Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.

If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.

If we release our fixed ideas about how the world should appear, desires can simply fall away. Our attention is paid to releasing, not wanting to release.

I sold my soul, you brought it back for me. And held me up, and gave me dignity.

Why is it that loving something provides such little protection from betrayal?

I saw the desert, it grew upon me. There are times, when I have sorrows, that I hunger and thirst for it.

He who dies for virtue does not perish.

[Court] is an institution that depends on making tough decisions in close cases for reasons that it explains well and that, in the past at least, have proven satisfactory to the public.

I can't believe I am hosting the Oscars. It's an honor everyone else said no.

To believe something strongly when it is clearly hard to define and prove, and has not been proven, is to be prejudiced.

I think that I get to represent different types of beauty that [are] not just my own.