Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I have a naive trust in the universe – that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

102. “A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

103. “The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin con petire, which meant “to seek together.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

104. “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

105. “Subjective experience is not just one of the dimensions of life, it is life itself.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

106. “Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

107. “Try to be inspired by something every day. Try to inspire at least one person every day.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

108. “Creating meaning involves bringing order to the contents of the mind by integrating one’s actions into a unified flow experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

109. “The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

110. “If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

111. “We can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

112. “For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don’t know about.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

113. “In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

114. “It’s exhilarating to come closer and closer to self-discipline. You make your body go and everything hurts; then you look back in awe at the self, at what you’ve done, it just blows your mind. It leads to ecstasy, to self-fulfillment. If you win these battles enough, that battle against yourself, at least for a moment, it becomes easier to win the battles in the world.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

115. “Consuming culture is never as rewarding as producing it.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

116. “The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

117. “There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what’s happening in the nondigital world.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

118. “One must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one more than what one is.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

119. “When not preoccupied with our selves, we actually have a chance to expand the concept of who we are. Loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed forward.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

120. “The more a person feels skilled, the more her moods will improve; while the more challenges that are present, the more her attention will become focused and concentrated.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

121. “It’s exhilarating to come closer and closer to self-discipline.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

122. “The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

123. “It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

124. “After curiosity, this quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart in college from their peers. Without this quality, they could not have sustained the hard work, the ‘perspiration.’ Curiosity and drive are in many ways the yin and the yang that need to be combined in order to achieve something new.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

125. “Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

126. “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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

127. “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

128. “Of course my own self exists solely in my own consciousness; in that of others who know me there will be versions of it, most of them probably unrecognizable likenesses of the “original” – myself as I see me.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

129. “The body is like a probe full of sensitive devices that tries to obtain what information it can from the awesome reaches of space.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

130. “Through learning we grow, becoming more than we were before, and in that sense learning is unselfish, because it results in the transformation of what we were before, a setting aside of the old self in favor of a more complex one.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

131. “It is how we choose what we do, and how we approach it, that will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

132. “When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

133. “If a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble, that the work will enable people to connect with something large – more permanent than their material existence – people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

134. “While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal – health, beauty, money or power – is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

135. “Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. “He who desires but acts not,” wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, “Breeds pestilence.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

136. “We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration...”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

137. “Buddhists advise us to “act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.” This serious playfulness makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at the same time.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

138. “In an integrated family, each person’s goals matter to all others. In.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

139. “There was a time when it was admirable to be an amateur poet or a dilettante scientist, because it meant that the quality of life could be improved by engaging in such activities. But increasingly the emphasis has been to value behavior over subjective states; what is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

140. “The flow experience, like everything else, is not “good” in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

141. “And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can’t be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

142. “Even pain is better than the chaos that seeps into an unfocused mind. Hurting oneself, whether physically or emotionally, ensures that attention can be focused on something that, although painful, is at least controllable – since we are the ones causing it.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

143. “Without respect, the subtle alchemy that binds an organization or that serves as the impetus for a business transaction would dissolve into mutual suspicion and hostility.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

144. “When people are asked to choose from a list the best description of how they feel when doing whatever they enjoy doing most – reading, climbing mountains, playing chess, whatever – the answer most frequently chosen is “designing or discovering something new.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

145. “To pursue mental operations to any depth, a person has to learn to concentrate attention. Without focus, consciousness is in a state of chaos.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

146. “However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

147. “There will be no good business unless the majority comes to agree that we should demand more from business than large quarterly returns.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

148. “We all know individuals who can transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the force of their personalities. 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

149. “A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

150. “A large majority of our respondents were inspired by a tension in their domain that became obvious when looked at from the perspective of another domain. Even though they do not think of themselves as interdisciplinary, their best work bridges realms of ideas. Their histories tend to cast doubt on the wisdom of overspecialization, where bright young people are trained to become exclusive experts in one field and shun breadth like the plague.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi