Peak Experience Quotes

Walking was a habit he'd been unwilling to give up. He couldn't see the point in shutting himself up in a vehivle any more often than he had to, doing damage to the earth and the air in order to avoid using his body.
People did just that all the time, though. Most claimed they needed to save time. It was true they had little enough of that-- their lives were so soon ended. But Nathan didn't see them treating time as precious otherwise. They'd sit in their cars at a fast-food place for fifteen minutes when it would be quicker to park and go inside.
No, he blamed the modern culture of urgency. Only the most urgent sensations, emotions, and situations were considered important. They called it living life to the fullest. Not surprisingly, many sought numbness in alcohol or the pervasive voyeurism of reality TV while others tried to live a perpetual peak experience through drugs, sex, or celebrity. Ordinary lives, ordinary living had little value.
Nathan thought people needed to wash dishes by hand sometimes. Prepare their own meals more often. And take walks. ~ Eileen Wilks

The emotional reaction in the peak experience has a special flavor of wonder, of awe, of reverence, of humility and surrender before the experience as before something great. ~ Abraham Maslow

We'll always be disappointed if we believe that we can plan for a peak experience and make it happen. True joy can't be anticipated or planned. It just strikes. ~ Harriet Lerner

Sport is singularly able to give us peak experience where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential. ~ George A. Sheehan

It's strange, isn't it, how you never know you're living the best time of your life at the moment you're living it? If you could appreciate, at that instant, that this is it, maybe you'd make certain your mind imprinted every detail of the sights, smells, sounds and sensations.
Then again, maybe knowing that life will only get duller, sadder, less hopeful afterward would inject melancholy into that moment. You'd miss life's peak experience by mourning it before it passes.
So perhaps it's best not to know. ~ Anita Bartholomew

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer's feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist's love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it 'superhuman'; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity.

Maslow's importance is that he has placed these experiences of 'transcendence' at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of 'the source of power, meaning and purpose' inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called 'generalised hypertension', a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a 'passively negative' attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstrea ~ Colin Wilson

Embracing a different vocabulary, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described a highly sought-after affective state called the flow state or flow experience. In such intrinsically motivating experiences, which can occur in any domain of activity, people report themselves as fully engaged with and absorbed by the object of their attention. In one sense, those "in flow" are not conscious of the experience at the moment; on reflection, however, such people feel that they have been fully alive, totally realized, and involved in a "peak experience." Individuals who regularly engage in creative activities often report that they seek such states; the prospect of such "periods of flow" can be so intense that individuals will exert considerable practice and effort, and even tolerate physical or psychological pain, in pursuit thereof. Committed writers may claim that they hate the time spent chained to their desks, but the thought that they would not have the opportunity to attain occasional periods of flow while writing proves devastating. ~ Howard Gardner

During a peak experience," Maslow explained, "the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one's consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy. ~ Steven Kotler

Sometimes when you've reached a peak experience, you look for other peak experiences ... I'd always been interested in art. I was looking for other experiences outside of sports. Art was a form of expression I had always liked a great deal. ~ Bob Beamon

Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters. Moments of intensity are also moments of power and control; yet we have so little understanding of this that we wait passively for some chance to galvanize the muscle that created the intensity.

But whether you use the negative methods of relaxation (which is fundamentally 'transcendental meditation') or the positive method of intense alertness and concentration, the result is the same: a realization of the enormous vistas of reality that lie outside our normal range of awareness. You recognize that the chief obstacle to such awareness is that we don't need it to get through an ordinary working day. I can make do fairly well with a narrow awareness and a moderate mount of vital energy. I have 'peak experiences' when I occasionally develop more awareness and more energy than I need for the task in hand; then I 'overflow', and realize, for a dazzled moment, what a fascinating universe I actually inhabit. It is significant that Maslow's 'peakers' were not daydreaming romantics, but healthy, practical people... ~ Colin Wilson

The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience. ~ Colin Wilson

Man knows himself as body, and what he knows of spirit comes through grace. The poet would call it inspiration. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Man has no control over his inspiration. If a piece of music or a poem has moved him once, he can never be certain that it will happen again. But man hates to think that he has no control over the spirit. It would discourage him too much. He likes to believe that he can summon the spirit by some ordinary act. Instead of striving to prepare himself for it through discipline and prayer, he tries to summon it arbitrarily through some physical act - drinking Düsseldorf beer, for instance. . .

Stein said, chuckling:

Which is the way all good Düsseldorfers summon the spirit, since our Dunkelbier is the best in Germany.

The priest laughed with him, and for a moment Sorme had a curious impression that he was listening to an argument between two undergraduates instead of two men in their late sixties. He shrank deeper into his armchair, wanting them to forget his presence. The priest stopped laughing first, and Sorme had a glimpse of the tiredness that always lay behind his eyes. Stein also became grave again. He said:

Very well. But what has this to do with the murderer?

It has to do with sex. For sex is the favourite human device for summoning the spirit. And since it is also God's gift of procreation, it nearly always works. . . unlike music and poetry.

Or beer, ~ Colin Wilson

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want. ~ C.E. Morgan

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E'.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don't come and go as they please, leaving 'this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate'. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are 'intentional'.

And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike's discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones.

Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience - sudden depression, fatigue, even the 'panic fear' that swept William James to the edge of insanity - is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression - or neurosis - need ~ Colin Wilson

See, the human mind is kind of like...a pinata. When it breaks open, there's a lot of surprises inside. Once you get the pinata perspective, you see that losing your mind can be a peak experience. ~ Jane Wagner

People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art. ~ Haruki Murakami

A novel is something that stands at the end of a lengthy process called writing. It is not a preexisting Platonic form embedded within the writer... I do not have a Boston marathon inside me waiting to get out. The marathon is a peak experience I am rightly entitled to only as the culmination of years of regular training and love of running. ~ Victoria Nelson

I do my best to allow myself to really feel it [emotional pain]. Cry. Get all in it. Really experience my experience so that I may move through it. And talk about it. I try not to let anything get brushed over and swept under the rug. ~ Dash Mihok

It is clear that every civilization undergoes a process of historical change. We can see that a civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence. ~ Carroll Quigley

Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing. ~ David Lovelace

Every thought has a consequence. And every experience has a causative thought behind it. ~ Ernest Holmes

Your soul wants experience. It wants the world. You're a human - and your eternal. The two are the same. ~ Frederick Lenz

Christianity is based on a book. It centers in a Person. It expresses itself in a message. It authenticates itself in an experience. ~ J. Sidlow Baxter

Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience. ~ Richard Dawkins

I think music is what takes the experience off the screen into your soul, into your head. ~ Matthew Vaughn

Leaving my family behind was very scary. I had to grow up quick. But being so young and paying in this league [the WNBA], I'm glad I did it because it's been the best experience in my life. ~ Lauren Jackson

My experience of that liberation, what Buddha had called Nirvana, set me off in the path of scientific investigation of that Oneness, the thing people call, meeting with God. And that meeting triggered an unquenchable thirst in me to develop a proper scientific method to understand and further explore that apparently bizarre domain of Universal Consciousness. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Education stuffs you full of ideas without the coinciding experience that gave rise to those ideas in the first place, giving you incorrect perspective and notions. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world. Often the argument is that in countries like Bangladesh, Trinidad, or Cameroon, which hover between the stifling legacy of colonial domination and their own magical traditions, official credentials are seen as a kind of material fetish - magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience, or training they're supposed to represent. But since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most "advanced" economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. ~ David Graeber

When I arrived in the stables, he startled me from behind the door. Without a word, he grabbed me up in his arms and carried me into the loft. There he had lit a dozen candles, and strewn rose petals and blankets over a bed of sweet-smelling hay."
"A dozen lit candles in a stable full of dry hay? You're lucky you survived the experience, sweetheart. You could have been tinder."
Sophia raised her eyebrows and stiffened her posture. "Our love was an inferno. I thought I would go up in flames, so glorious was our pleasure that night."
He covered his eyes with a hand and laughed, loud and long. "What a vivid romantic imagination you have. ~ Tessa Dare

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude. ~ Denis Waitley

First letter : The power of authenticity

The most important gift we can give ourselves is the commitment to living our authentic life. To be true to ourselves, however is not an easy task. We must break free of the seductions of society and live life on our own terms, under our own values and aligned with our original dreams. We must tap our hidden selves; explore the deep seated, unseen hopes, desires, strength and weakness the make us who we are. We have to understand where we have been and know where we are going. Every decision we make, every step we take, must be informed by our commitment to living a life that is true and honest and authentic to ourselves and ourselves alone. And as we proceed, we are certain to experience fortune well beyond our highest imagination. ~ Robin S. Sharma

Without the thought, though the material parts already exist, the form does not and cannot. The creation is not a product of the matter and is not simply a rearrangement of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitations of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree form to create a table form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to creation out of nothing, and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist. Thus Berdyaev is able to say: "God created the world by imagination. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Everything you have done and been through is valuable and important. In order to be who you are, to know what you know, to be where you are in this moment, you needed to go through what you went through. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

...experience has proved the distinction of active and passive courage. The fanatic who endures without a groan the torture of the rack or the state would tremble and fly before the face of an armed enemy. ~ Edward Gibbon

All of us experience fear, but when we confront and acknowledge it, we are able to turn it into courage. Being courageous does not mean never being scared; it means acting as you know you must even though you are undeniably afraid. ~ Desmond Tutu

Whatever I learned,
Whatever I knew,
Seems like those faded years of childhood that flew,
Away in some dilemma,
Always in some confusion,
The purpose of this life,
Seems like an illusion! ~ Mehek Bassi

Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun, seeing it set in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, seeing - rather, knowing for sure - that there was a purposefullness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos - that it was beyond man's rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience.
There seems to be more to the universe than random, chaotic, purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles.
On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious. ~ Edgar D. Mitchell

When I'm criticized unjustly (from my own viewpoint, at least), or when someone I'm sure will understand me doesn't, I go running for a little longer than usual. By running longer it's like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points. And one of the results of running a little farther than usual is that I become that much stronger. If I'm angry, I direct that anger toward myself. If I have a frustrating experience, I use that to improve myself. ~ Haruki Murakami

I don't have a lot of experience to draw from. I had my first kiss when I was 17 or 18. The second time we kissed I got a little excited and I was wearing these really loose shorts that didn't leave much to the imagination. I tried to angle my body away and divert her eyes by saying, "Hey, look at the stars." From then on I wore tighter jeans. ~ Jon Heder

By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists ... Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

In my body were many bloods, some dark blood, all blended in the fire of six or more generations. I was, then, either a new type of man or the very oldest. In any case I was inescapably myself. . . . If I achieved greatness of human stature, then just to the degree that I did I would justify all the blood in me. If I proved worthless, then I would betray all. In my own mind I could not see the dark blood as something quite different and apart. But if people wanted to say this dark blood was Negro blood and if they then wanted to call me a Negro - this was up to them. Fourteen years of my life I had lived in the white group, four years I had lived in the colored group. In my experience there had been no main difference between the two. But if people wanted to isolate and fasten on those four years and to say that therefore I was colored, this too was up to them. . . .I determined what I would do. To my real friends of both groups, I would, at the right time, voluntarily define my position. As for people at large, naturally I would go my way and say nothing unless the question was raised. If raised, I would meet it squarely, going into as much detail as seemed desirable for the occasion. Or again, if it was not the person's business I would either tell him nothing or the first nonsense that came into my head. ~ Jean Toomer

I am one of those who believe that spiritual progress is a rule of human life, but the approach to perfection is slow and painful. If a woman elevates herself in one respect and is retarded in another, it is because the rough trail that leads to the mountain peak is not free of ambushes of thieves and lairs of wolves. ~ Khalil Gibran

Life is just a series of peaks and troughs, and you don't whether you're in a trough until you're climbing out, or on a peak until you're coming down. And that's it, you know, you never know what's round the corner. But it's all good. "If you want the rainbow you've got to put up with the rain". Do you know which "philosopher" said that? Dolly Parton. And people say she's just a big pair of tits. ~ David Brent

Challenge yourself to hear their experience without questioning its expression. Avoid being the tone police. ~ Dolly Chugh

My feelings are intelligent, directive, and revealing
From the inside out they rise, flow, reveal
Uncovering, releasing, freeing
Reshaping my experience
Lifting my mood ~ Deborah Sandella

To discover a city is in itself a unique event, but when we have the privilege of sharing it with friends most dear to us, it becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience. ~ Reinaldo Arenas

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process. ~ Terence McKenna

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If experience is the best teacher, there's nothing that comes close to the experience of life. ~ Michael A. Singer

The question 'Why poetry?' isn't asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: "What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that's unutterable?" You can't generalize very usefully about poetry; you can't reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can't successfully answer the question of "Why poetry?," can't reduce it in the way I think you can't, then maybe that's the strongest evidence that poetry's doing its job; it's creating an essential need and then satisfying it. ~ Richard Ford

Every (stressful thought) is a variation on a single theme: This shouldn't be happening. I shouldn't be having this experience. God is unjust. Life isn't fair. ~ Byron Katie

Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us [...], because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. ~ Edmund Burke

Whatever your goal in life, the beginning is knowledge and experience ~ Henry Ford

I played to win. When I was a child, my brothers and I played cowboys and Indians in the park, and I was always an Indian who got captured. That was a learning experience; they were showing me that as a woman I was going to be captured. But in a metaphorical sense, I think I did eventually become a cowboy. ~ Ita Buttrose

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together. ~ Jess Row

One of the great myths about war is that there is a ground zero, a center stage, where the terrible forces unleashed by it can be witnessed, recounted, and replayed like the launching of a rocket. War is a human activity far too large to be contained in the experience of a single reporter in a single place and time in any meaningful way. When it comes, it happens to everyone. Everything is in its path. Yet this is the allure of war reporting, the chance of acquiring some personal mother lode of truth to beam back to the living rooms of a waiting nation. The fear that comes from reporting on a war is as much a fear of missing this mother load as it is of being injured or killed in battle, and it sets reporters apart from the people who have to fight wars. Soldiers have their own agonies to think about as a battle approaches. Missing the war is not generally one of them. ~ John Hockenberry

Zane turned his attention to the bus. Phoebe got a bad feeling when she caught sight of the worn sandals, tie-dyed T-shirts and woven hats on the next couple to disembark.
"Hey," the man said. "I'm Martin Lagarde and this is my wife, Andrea."
The woman, a thirtysomething brunette with freckles and glasses, shook hands with Zane.
"We're so excited to be here. Martin and I just love being in the outdoors. We've hiked all over, and last year we did a week at a meditation retreat in Hawaii, but we've never done anything like this." She continued to pump his hand as her expression turned earnest. "We really want this opportunity to be one with the land. To experience a different kind of life. The Old West." She finally released Zane's hand. "We're vegetarians. I hope that won't be a problem."
Zane considered them for a moment, then said, "Not for me." He jerked his head toward the compartment beneath the bus that the driver had opened. "Collect your gear and head inside. Chase will show you where you'll bunk tonight."
"Sure thing," Martin said.
He held up his hand for a high five. When Zane simply stared at him, Martin grabbed Zane's wrist and pulled it until it was level with his shoulder, then slapped his hand against Zane's.
When he walked away, Zane turned to look at her. "Two starving kids and tree-hugging vegetarians. I'm going to kill Chase. ~ Susan Mallery