Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

472. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

484. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “We have come to accept that our morality simply no longer has currency outside our own culture.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

494. “Almost any kind of feedback can be enjoyable, provided it is logically related to a goal in which one has invested psychic energy. If.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

495. “In the past few centuries economic rationality has een so successful that we have come to take for granted that the “bottom line” of any human effort is to be measured in dollars and cents. But an exclusively economic approach to life is profoundly irrational; the true bottom line consists in the quality and complexity of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

496. “Even the most highly respected physicist, artist, or politician becomes a hollow bore and ceases to enjoy life if all he can interest himself in is his limited role in the universe.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

497. “Of the many causes that shaped St. Francis’s actions, a primary one was the belief that his actions mattered, and that he had a responsibility to change the world around him. This belief, in itself, is a “cause.” The idea of free will is a self-fulfilling prophecy; those who abide by it are liberated from the absolute determinism of external forces. Chance.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

498. “All social controls, for instance, are ultimately based on a threat to the survival instinct. The people of an oppressed country obey their conquerors because they want to go on living.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

499. “If we are learning to be more assertive, we might inadvertently alienate our friends.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

500. “The pleasure we take in eating is an efficient way to ensure that the body will get the nourishment it needs. The pleasure of sexual intercourse is an equally practical method for the genes to program the body to reproduce and thereby to ensure the continuity of the genes.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi