Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Creating meaning involves bringing order to the contents of the mind by integrating one’s actions into a unified flow experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

103. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

119. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “We have seen earlier that when an activity is thoroughly engrossing, there is not enough attention left over to allow a person to consider either the past or the future, or any other temporarily irrelevant stimuli. One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking about it: our own self.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

146. “Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi