Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “How to keep love fresh? The answer is the same as it is for any other activity. To be enjoyable, a relationship must become more complex. To become more complex, the partners must discover new potentialities in themselves and in each other. To discover these, they must invest attention in each other – so that they can learn what thoughts and feelings, what dreams reside in their partner’s mind. This in itself is a never-ending process, a lifetime’s task. After.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

452. “In any case, an individual can experience only so much. Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

453. “For the majority of people on this earth, life goals are simple: to survive, to leave children who will in turn survive, and, if possible, to do so with a certain amount of comfort and dignity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

454. “This fact brings us to the second condition that affects whether an optimal experience will occur or not: an individual’s ability to restructure consciousness so as to make flow possible.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

455. “But how enjoyable an activity is depends ultimately on its complexity. The small automatic games woven into the fabric of everyday life help reduce boredom, but add little to the positive quality of experience. For that one needs to face more demanding challenges, and use higher-level skills.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

456. “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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

457. “One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment. Compared.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

458. “I am free, free in my work, because I do whatever I want. If I don’t do something today I will do it tomorrow. I don’t have a boss, I am the boss of my own life. I have kept my freedom and I have fought for my freedom.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

459. “Children who grow up in family situations that facilitate clarity of goals, feedback, feeling of control, concentration on the task at hand, intrinsic motivation, and challenge will generally have a better chance to order their lives so as to make flow possible.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

460. “As Democritus said so simply many centuries ago: “Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim.” To swim in this case involves learning to distinguish the useful and the harmful forms of flow, and then making the most of the former while placing limits on the latter. The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people’s chances to enjoy theirs.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

461. “But as soon as these basic problems of survival are solved, merely having enough food and a comfortable shelter is no longer sufficient to make people content. New needs are felt, new desires arise. With affluence and power come escalating expectations, and as our level of wealth and comforts keeps increasing, the sense of well-being we hoped to achieve keeps receding into the distance.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

462. “This is not to imply that a return to the rigid values and limited choices of the past would be preferable – even if that were a possibility, which it is not. The complexity and freedom that have been thrust upon us, and that our ancestors had fought so hard to achieve, are a challenge we must find ways to master.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

463. “Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience. They.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

464. “This cultural hubris, or overweening presumption about what we are entitled to from a universe that is basically insensitive to human needs, generally leads to trouble.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

465. “The most detailed information about who we are as individuals comes from those we communicate with, and from the way we accomplish our jobs.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

466. “To many people activities like working or raising children provide more flow than playing a game or painting a picture, because these individuals have learned to perceive opportunities in such mundane tasks that others do not see.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

467. “The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a very rare gift. Those who possess it are called “survivors,” and are said to have “resilience,” or “courage.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

468. “As Freud and many others before and after him have noted, civilization is built on the repression of individual desires.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

469. “Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them,” said Epictetus a long time ago. And the great emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

470. “Changing external conditions might seem to work at first, but if a person is not in control of his consciousness, the old fears or desires will soon return, reviving previous anxieties. One.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

471. “Developing a discriminating palate, like any other skill, requires the investment of psychic energy. But the energy invested is returned many times over in a more complex experience. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

472. “In each person’s life, the chances of only good things happening are extremely slim. The likelihood that our desires will be always fulfilled is so minute as to be negligible.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

473. “This ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks is the quality people most admire in others, and justly so; it is probably the most important trait not only for succeeding in life, but for enjoying it as well.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

474. “Socializing of this kind mimics friendship relations, but it provides few of the benefits of the real thing. Everyone takes pleasure in occasionally passing the time of day chatting, but many people become extremely dependent on a daily “fix” of superficial contacts. This is especially true for individuals who cannot tolerate solitude, and who have little emotional support at home.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

475. “It is a circuitous path that begins with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

476. “Holistic medicine and such books as Norman Cousins’s account of his successful fight against terminal illness and Dr. Bernie Siegel’s descriptions of self-healing are beginning to redress the abstractly materialist view of health that has become so prevalent in this century.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

477. “In many ways, competition is a quick way of developing complexity: “He who wrestles with us,” wrote Edmund Burke, “strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

478. “What would really satisfy people is not getting slim or rich, but feeling good about their lives. In the quest for happiness, partial solutions don’t work.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

479. “Agon includes games that have competition as their main feature, such as most sports and athletic events;.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

480. “We are always getting to live, as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, but never living. Or as poor Frances learned in the children’s story, it is always bread and jam tomorrow, never brad and jam today.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

481. “A starting point would be to say that one society is “better” than another if a greater number of its people have access to experiences that are in line with their goals. A second essential criterion would specify that these experiences should lead to the growth of the self on an individual level, by allowing as many people as possible to develop increasingly complex skills.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

482. “Socialization, or the transformation of a human organism into a person who functions successfully within a particular social system, cannot be avoided.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

483. “The same is true of all flow experiences: there is a mutual relationship between goals and the effort they require. Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal. One gets married because the spouse seems worthy of sharing one’s life with, but unless one then behaves as if this is true, the partnership will appear to lose value with time. All.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

484. “The quality of experience of people who play with and transform the opportunities in their surroundings, as Joe did, is clearly more developed as well as more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to live within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot alter.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

485. “Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J. S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.” 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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

486. “Involvement is greatly facilitated by the ability to concentrate. People who suffer from attentional disorders, who cannot keep their minds from wandering, always feel left out of the flow of life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

487. “Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosophers of our century, described how he achieved personal happiness: “Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.” There could be no better short description of how to build for oneself an autotelic personality.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

488. “Of course we don’t have to undertake any of these plans. But if we don’t, chances are, sooner or later, we will regret it.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

489. “But if one assumes that people have a choice in how they respond to external events, in what meaning they attribute to suffering, then one can interpret the constructive response as normal and the neurotic one as a failure to rise to the challenge, as a breakdown in the ability to flow.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

490. “When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

491. “What matters is not what he has now, but what he might obtain if he does as others want him to do. Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

492. “Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them,” said Epictetus.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

493. “Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

494. “One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder – that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

495. “But a cultivated palate provides many opportunities for flow if one approaches eating – and cooking – in a spirit of adventure and curiosity, exploring the potentials of food for the sake of the experience rather than as a showcase for one’s expertise. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

496. “Learning to use time alone, instead of escaping from it, is especially important in our early years. Teenagers who can’t bear solitude disqualify themselves from later carrying out adult tasks that require serious mental preparation.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

497. “Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

498. “This is where the presumed advantage of a contemplative life comes in. Detached reflection upon experience, a realistic weighing of options and their consequences, have long been held to be the best approach to a good life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

499. “Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing it intentionally like a beam of energy – as do E. and R. in the previous examples – or by diffusing it in desultory, random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used. Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

500. “For example, teenagers enjoy impromptu interactions in which they try to “gross each other out,” or tell tall stories, or make fun of their teachers.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi