Top 280 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— 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. “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

124. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

126. “It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

127. “People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media. They are easily manipulated by demagogues, pacified by entertainers, and exploited by anyone who has something to sell.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

128. “It sounds somewhat ridiculous to say that one of the problems we face at this point in history is that we haven’t learned how to spend free time in a sensible way.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

129. “You could say that I worked every minute of my life, or you could say with equal justice that I never worked a day.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

130. “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

131. “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

132. “Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

134. “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

135. “Unconditional acceptance, the complete trust family members ought to have for one another, is meaningful only when it is accompanied by an unstinting investment of attention. Otherwise it is just an empty gesture, a hypocritical pretense indistinguishable from disinterest.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

136. “Many lives are disrupted by tragic accidents, and even the most fortunate are subjected to stresses of various kinds. Yet such blows do not necessarily diminish happiness. It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.”

— 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. “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

139. “The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly,” in the words of J. H. Holmes. “It is simply indifferent.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

140. “Cicero once wrote that to be completely free one must become a slave to a set of laws. In other words, accepting limitations is liberating.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

141. “The traits that mark an autotelic personality are most clearly revealed by people who seem to enjoy situations that ordinary persons would find unbearable. Lost.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

142. “Hobbies that demand skill, habits that set goals and limits, personal interests, and especially inner discipline help to make leisure what it is supposed to be – a chance for re-creation.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

143. “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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

144. “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

145. “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

146. “To play the trumpet well, a musician can not let more than a few days pass without practicing.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

147. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

150. “The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power. The shields that have worked in the past – the order that religion, patriotism, ethnic traditions, and habits instilled by social classes used to provide – are no longer effective for increasing numbers of people who feel exposed to the harsh winds of chaos.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi