There are two main strategies we can try 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.

Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is fine as long as everything goes well. But the moment bioloical or social goals are frustrated- which in the long run is inevitable - a person must formulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or else he will always waste his energies in inner turmoil.

Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.

If you're alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.

To gain control over the quality of experience, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.

If the firms that employ an increasing majority of the population are driven solely to satisfy the owner's greed at the expense of working conditions, of the stability of the community, and of the health of the environment, chances are that the quality of our lives will be worse than it is now.

Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.

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.

What I "discovered" was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. 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.

Knowing oneself is not so much a question of discovering what is present in one's self, but rather the creation of who one wants to be.

Through learning we grow, becoming more than we were before, and in that sense learning is unselfish, because it results in the transformation of what we were before, a setting aside of the old self in favor of a more complex one.

A self that is only differentiated - not integrated - may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person who self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.

the self expands through acts of self forgetfulness.

It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.

When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.

Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk-the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behaviour, the second can wilt if not cultivated.

Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain.

Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.

The downside, of course, is that over time religions become encrusted with precepts and ideas that are the antithesis of soul, as each faith tries to protect its doctrines and institution instead of nurturing the evolution of consciousness. If one is not careful to distinguish the genuine insights of a religion from its irrelevant accretions, one can go through life following an inappropriate moral compass.

Produce as many ideas as possible. Try to produce unlikely ideas.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an individual, each of them is a multitude.

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.

Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.

Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.

A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.

What I "discovered" was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. 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.

Music is usually resorted to as a form of self-therapy when you?re not involved enough in what you?re doing so that part of your mind needs to be distracted from what otherwise would become boring.

The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind...It seems that every time a pressing danger is avoided a new and more sophisticated threat appears on the horizon...Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe

The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to it's limited in voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.

Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.

Act as if the future of the universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking that your actions make any difference.

I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.

To live means to experience-through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested.

What does this contradictory pattern mean?one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like. They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible.

It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.

It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.

People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work

Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade leverage Amazon's existing Search Inside the Book technology to give customers unusual flexibility in how they buy and read books.

The three most important things in retail are location, location, location. The three most important things for our consumer business are technology, technology, technology.

Are you lazy or just incompetent?

The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.