Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “But consciousness cannot be expanded; all we can do is shuffle its content, which gives us the impression of having broadened it somehow. The price of most artificially induced alterations, however, is that we lose control over that very consciousness we were supposed to expand. Mimicry.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

452. “But a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free. His thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television. He will be at the mercy of “experts.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

453. “Information enters consciousness either because we intend to focus attention on it or as a result of attentional habits based on biological or social instructions.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

454. “Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

455. “For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

456. “Part of the answer probably has to do with innate genetic causes.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

457. “But the point is still valid: human relations are malleable, and if a person has the appropriate skills their rules can be transformed. But.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

458. “Teenagers, who swing from one threat to their fragile evolving personhood to another in quick succession throughout the day, especially depend on the soothing patterns of sound to restore order in their consciousness. But so do many adults. One.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

459. “Leisure that uses up external resources, however, often requires less attention, and as a consequence it generally provides less memorable rewards.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

460. “Purpose gives direction to one’s efforts, but it does not necessarily make life easier. Goals can lead into all sorts of trouble, at which point one gets tempted to give them up and find some less demanding script by which to order one’s actions. The price one pays for changing goals whenever opposition threatens is that while one may achieve a more pleasant and comfortable life, it is likely that it will end up empty and void of meaning.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

461. “The “battle” is not really against the self, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness. It is really a battle for the self; it is a struggle for establishing control over attention.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

462. “The meaning of life is meaning: whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

463. “The strategy consists in extracting from the order achieved by past generations patterns that will help avoid disorder in one’s own mind. There is much knowledge – or well-ordered information – accumulated in culture, ready for this use. Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy, and religion are there for anyone to see as examples of how harmony can be imposed on chaos. Yet so many people ignore them, expecting to create meaning in their lives by their own devices.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

464. “To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

465. “Over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come – every thought, memory, feeling, or action. It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

466. “In John Fletcher’s words, “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

467. “But even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious “leisure” time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

468. “Work not only transforms the environment by building bridges across rivers and cultivating barren plains; it also transforms the worker from an animal guided by instincts into a conscious, goal-directed, skillful person.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

469. “Unfortunately, too many adults feel that once they have hit twenty or thirty – or certainly forty – they are entitled to relax in whatever habitual grooves they have established.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

470. “In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious “leisure” time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible. The largest part of free time – almost half of it for American adults – is spent in front of the television set. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

471. “One can survive solitude, but only if one finds ways of ordering attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mind.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

472. “When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

473. “An open stance makes it possible for a person to be objective, to be aware of alternative possibilities, to feel a part of the surrounding world.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

474. “But it seems clear that an increasing majority are not being helped by traditional religions and belief systems. Many are unable to separate the truth in the old doctrines from the distortions and degradations that time has added, and since they cannot accept error, they reject the truth as well. Others are so desperate for some order that they cling rigidly to whatever belief happens to be at hand – warts and all – and become fundamentalist Christians, or Muslims, or communists.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

475. “A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

476. “When a person’s psychic energy coalesces into a life theme, consciousness achieves harmony.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

477. “As long as a significant segment of society has few opportunities to encounter meaningful challenges, and few chances to develop the skills necessary to benefit from them, we must expect that violence and crime will attract those who cannot find their way to more complex autotelic experiences.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

478. “The same effect can be achieved in different ways, either through perfecting a severe mental discipline as in Yoga or through cultivating constant spontaneity as in Zen. But the intended result is identical: to free inner life from the threat of chaos, on the one hand, and from the rigid conditioning of biological urges, on the other, and hence to become independent from the social controls that exploit both.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

479. “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 whose self is based exclusively on integration will be 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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

480. “If a person is unwilling to adjust personal goals when starting a relationship, then a lot of what subsequently happens in that relationship will produce disorder in the person’s consciousness, because novel patterns of interaction will conflict with old patterns of expectation.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

481. “It is within each person’s power to decide whether its order will be restored from the outside, in ways over which we have no control, or whether the order will be the result of an internal pattern that grows organically from our skills and knowledge.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

482. “Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

483. “Yet, the elders said, at times the world became too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

484. “The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

485. “Without interest in the world, a desire to be actively related to it, a person becomes isolated into himself.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

486. “Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

487. “It is for this reason that pleasure is so evanescent, and that the self does not grow as a consequence of pleasurable experiences. Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

488. “These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or a dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally, “amateur,” from the Latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly a “dilettante,” from the Latin delectare, “to find delight in,” was someone who enjoyed a given activity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

489. “Unfortunately, this natural connection between growth and enjoyment tends to disappear with time. Perhaps because “learning” becomes an external imposition when schooling starts, the excitement of mastering new skills gradually wears out. It becomes all too easy to settle down within the narrow boundaries of the self developed in adolescence.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

490. “How can it help a person learn to rid himself of anxieties and fears and thus become free of the controls of society, whose rewards he can now take or leave? As suggested before, the way is through control over consciousness, which in turn leads to control over the quality of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

491. “In normal life, we keep interrupting what we do with doubts and questions. “Why am I doing this? Should I perhaps be doing something else?” Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

492. “Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy. Feeling a breeze on a hot day, seeing a cloud reflected on the glass facade of a high-rise, working on a business deal, watching a child play with a puppy, drinking a glass of water can all be felt as deeply satisfying experiences that enrich one’s life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

493. “The perfect society would be able to strike a healthy balance between the spiritual and material worlds, but short of aiming for perfection, we can look toward Eastern religions for guidance in how to achieve control over consciousness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

494. “Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

495. “Preoccupation with the self consumes psychic energy because in everyday life we often feel threatened.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

496. “Shaping one’s own reality, living in a world one has created, can be as enjoyable as writing a symphony. No.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

497. “Often we feel a sense of transcendence, as if the boundaries of the self had been expanded. The sailor feels at one with the boat, the wind, and the sea;.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

498. “Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bearing on the self. Does it threaten our goals, does it support them, or is it neutral?”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

499. “It is probably true that humans, like the majority of mammalian species, are not monogamous by nature. It is impossible for partners not to grow bored unless they work to discover new challenges in each other’s company, and learn appropriate skills for enriching the relationship. Initially physical challenges alone are enough to sustain flow, but unless romance and genuine care also develop, the relationship will grow stale.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

500. “En nuestra vida podemos tener muy poca influencia sobre las fuerzas que interfieren en nuestro bienestar.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi