Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

52. “Shift often from openness to closure.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

53. “Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

54. “If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

55. “The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

56. “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

57. “But shortcuts are dangerous; we cannot delude ourselves that our knowledge is further along than it actually is.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

58. “Entropy is the normal state of consciousness – a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

59. “It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%-when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

60. “Try to be surprised by something every day.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

61. “Happiness is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

62. “If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

63. “Studying creativity is not an elite distraction, but provides one of the most exciting models for living.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

64. “Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

65. “People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

66. “Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times – although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

67. “Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

68. “Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

69. “Discipline is not always internalized and actually can breed resentment among children.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

70. “Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

71. “When each of these three elements of vision-concern for excellence, for people and for the wider environment-are present, business is transformed from a tool for making profits into a creative, humane experiment for improving life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

72. “There are two main strategies we can try to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

73. “Flow” is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake. In reviewing some of the activities that consistently produce flow – such as sports, games, art, and hobbies – it becomes easier to understand what makes people happy.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

74. “And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

75. “As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

76. “When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

77. “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy – or attention – is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

78. “Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

79. “A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

80. “I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

81. “Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

82. “One of the surest ways to enrich life is to make experiences less fleeting.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

83. “Produce as many ideas as possible. Try to produce unlikely ideas.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

84. “It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

85. “What is the meaning of life?” turns out to be astonishingly simple. 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

86. “We shape our life by deciding to pay attention to it. It is the direction of our attention and its intensity that will determines what we accomplish and how well.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

87. “The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

88. “The rules themselves are clear enough, and within everyone’s reach. But many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way. It is a little like trying to lose weight: everyone knows what it takes, everyone wants to do it, yet it is next to impossible for so many.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

89. “Find a way to express what moves you.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

90. “For better or worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

91. “An ideal organization is one in which each worker’s potentialities find room for expression.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

92. “But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

93. “Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

94. “It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, and that would take away attention from the task at hand.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

95. “Unless a person knows how to give order to her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

96. “We can either help to make this world a more incredible place than it has ever been, or we can hasten its return to inorganic dust.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

97. “Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

98. “To be overcome with the ultimate goal often interferes with performance.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

99. “Someone who knows his desires and works with purpose to achieve them is a person whose feelings, thoughts, and actions are congruent with one another, and is therefore a person who has achieved inner harmony.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

100. “Participate as fully as possibly in the world around you.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi