Ellen J. Langer > Quotes

“The hefty price for accepting information uncritically is that we go through life unaware that what we’ve accepted as impossible may in fact be quite possible.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“My ideas sometimes get the better of me. Before I clearly explain one, another comes to mind and seizes my attention....”
― Ellen Langer

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

“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

“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

“We simply don’t know, which is why scientific research is an almost constant search for better truths and not “the truth.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

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

“Boredom can be just another construct of the mind....There is always something new to notice.”
― Ellen Langer, Emotional Intelligence: 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

“By mindfully considering data not as stable commodities but as sources of ambiguity, we become more observant.”
― Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning

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

“mindful approach to any activity has three characteristics: the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective”
― Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning

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

“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

“Helping feels good to the helper, but over time it may make the helped feel incompetent. Dr.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“An awareness of alternatives at the early stages of learning a skill gives a conditional quality to the learning, which, again, increases mindfulness.”
― Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning

“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

“Wouldn’t it be more advantageous to recognize that when placebos work we are the ones controlling our health, to learn how to exercise it directly, and to see ourselves as efficacious when we do?”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“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

“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

“Psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver found a correlation between optimism and recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery.15 Others have studied how attitudes affect recovery and found that this improvement is not a function of a patient’s tendency to deny that he was ill.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility