Quotes on Flow
“I felt I was truly in the present moment. We tango dancers strive for this above all else, a zen-like state in which you feel as though the tango is animating your body, that you are effortlessly there with no past and no future. When you are only in the now, you are as purely yourself as you can be.”
- Sharna Fabiano, from an interview with Dance Place
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“To feel completely at one with what you are doing, to know you are strong and able to control your destiny at least for the moment, and to gain a sense of pleasure independent of results is to experience flow. The flow state has many names – optimal experience, playing in the zone, feeling on a high, and being totally focused are some of the more common labels. Whatever words you use to describe flow experiences, they’re sure to be associated with the most precious moments in your memory.”
- Susan A. Jackson & Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Flow in Sports
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“Although sport is a most secular activity in a highly secularized world, in its ability to provoke wonder, to elicit deep feeling, to grace our lives with glimpses of timeless beauty and freedom – in these and other ways sport is, though not religion, something religious.”
- Andrew Cooper, Playing in the Zone: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Sports
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“Happiness is absorption.”
- T.E. Lawrence
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“Athletes in sports, all over the world, seek moments like these. The feelings involved are among the most intense, most memorable experiences one can get in this life. The state they describe is what we call flow, or optimal experience. Once attained, flow experiences remain etched in the memory and provide the blueprint for returning to this optimal state.”
- Susan A. Jackson and Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Flow in Sports
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“What do these activities have in common? They all require daring, risk, concentration, the ability to live with uncertainty, a willingness to follow the rules of the game, and a desire for transcendence. They share the spirit of sacred play, where the child and the poet are at home with the savage. The savage is what we sometimes long to be – living by cunning and raw emotion, attuned to nature, senses alert, eluding danger, thrilled by challenge.”
- Diane Ackerman, Deep Play
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“Flow provides a glimpse of perfection.”
- Susan A. Jackson and Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Flow in Sports
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“. . . the good ones, the ones who moved with the most fluidity and least effort, danced blindly, like the world around them had completely vanished.”
- Brian Winter, Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien: A Yanqui’s Missteps in Argentina
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“Flow is a harmonious experience where mind and body are working together effortlessly, leaving the person feeling that something special has just occurred…This is because flow lifts experience from the ordinary to the optimal, and it is in those moments that we feel truly alive and in tune with what we are doing.”
- Susan A. Jackson and Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Flow in Sports
