Top 280 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “In an integrated family, each person’s goals matter to all others. In.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

152. “Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

153. “Perhaps the most urgent task facing us is to create a new educational curriculum that will make each child aware, from the first grade on, that life in the universe is interdependent. It should be an education that trains the mind to perceive the network of causes and effects in which our actions are embedded, and trains the emotions and the imagination to respond appropriately to the consequences of those actions.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

154. “We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

155. “Second, to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong from it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going?”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “Even when children are taught music, the usual problem often arises: too much emphasis is placed on how they perform, and too little on what they experience. Parents.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

161. “The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders. Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

162. “The roots of interpersonal conflict are often an excessive concern for oneself, and an inability to pay attention to the needs of others. It is sad to see how often people ruin a relationship because they refuse to recognize that they could serve their own interests best by helping others achieve theirs.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

163. “Whenever the outside world offers no mercy, an internal symbolic system can become a salvation.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

164. “In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

165. “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

166. “When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free. Solzhenitsyn.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

167. “Dante recognized that every system of spiritual order, when it becomes incorporated into a worldly structure like an organized church, begins to suffer the effects of entropy. So to extract meaning from a system of beliefs a person must first compare the information contained in it with his or her concrete experience, retain what makes sense, and then reject the rest.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

168. “I mean, we’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are – as far as we know – the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

169. “By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

170. “Many business leaders today view their jobs as entailing responsibility for the welfare of the wider community. These individuals do not define themselves as profit-making machines whose only reason for existing is to satisfy escalating expectation for immediate gain.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

171. “The way to grow while enjoying life is to create a higher form of order out of the entropy that is an inevitable condition of living. This means taking each new challenge not as something to be repressed or avoided, but as an opportunity for learning and for improving skills.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

172. “Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

173. “Psychiatrists describe schizophrenics as suffering from anhedonia, which literally means “lack of pleasure.” This symptom appears to be related to “stimulus overinclusion,” which refers to the fact that schizophrenics are condemned to notice irrelevant stimuli, to process information whether they like it or not.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

174. “For Mark Strand, the poet’s responsibility to be a witness, a recorder of experience, is part of the broader responsibility we all have for keeping the universe ordered through our consciousness:.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

175. “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

176. “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

177. “It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

178. “Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the bounds of reason. If a person learns to control his instinctual desires, not because he has to, but because he wants to, he can enjoy himself without becoming addicted. A.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

179. “The only path to finding out what life is about is a patient, slow attempt to make sense of the realities of the past and the possibilities of the future as they can be understood in the present.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

180. “But no social change can come about until the consciousness of individuals is changed first. When a young man asked Carlyle how he should go about reforming the world, Carlyle answered, “Reform yourself. That way there will be one less rascal in the world.” The advice is still valid. Those who try to make life better for everyone without having learned to control their own lives first usually end up making things worse all around.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

181. “For several years the researchers did not let anyone else in on their work, not because they were afraid it would be stolen, but because they were afraid that their colleagues would laugh at their seemingly crazy ideas.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

182. “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

183. “Perform with elan, brilliance and dash – at concert pitch.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

184. “The good things in life do not come only through the senses. Some of the most exhilarating experiences we undergo are generated inside the mind, triggered by information that challenges our ability to think, rather than from the use of sensory skills.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

185. “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

186. “Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: “What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions.” If.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

187. “Whatever the composition of a firm, if it is to do good business it should be a place where everyone is encouraged to progress toward complexity- or at the very least a place that does not make it more difficult to achieve personal growth.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

188. “A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

189. “The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

190. “Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it’s dead.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

191. “To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

192. “Assimilating the style of predecessors is necessary before one can develop one’s own. Only by immersing oneself in the domain can one find out whether there is room left for contributing creatively to it, and whether one is capable of doing so.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

193. “Among the many intellectual pursuits available, reading is currently perhaps the most often mentioned flow activity around the world. Solving.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

194. “This paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

196. “When people start believing that progress is inevitable and life easy, they may quickly lose courage and determination in the face of the first signs of adversity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

197. “Without a consistent set of goals, it is difficult to develop a coherent self. It is through the patterned investment of psychic energy provided by goals that one creates order in experience. This order, which manifests itself in predictable actions, emotions, and choices, in time becomes recognizable as a more or less unique “self.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

198. “If music modulates our feelings, so does food; and all the fine cuisines of the world are based on that knowledge. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

199. “Everything we experience – joy or pain, interest or boredom – is represented in the mind as information. If we are able to control this information, we can decide what our lives will be like.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

200. “The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi