Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

153. “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

154. “We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts, and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

155. “Within the individual life span as well, each person becomes exposed with age to increasingly contradictory goals, to incompatible opportunities for action. A child’s options are usually few and coherent; with each year, they become less so. The earlier clarity that made spontaneous flow possible is obscured by a cacophony of disparate values, beliefs, choices, and behaviors. Few.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

156. “When the lifestyle of a social group becomes obsolete, when work turns into a boring routine and community responsibilities lose their meaning, it is likely that leisure will become increasingly more important. And if a society becomes too dependent on entertainment, it is likely that there will be less psychic energy left to cope creatively with the technological and economic challenges that will inevitably arise.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

157. “Because optimal experience depends on the ability to control what happens in consciousness moment by moment, each person has to achieve it on the basis of his own individual efforts and creativity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

158. “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

159. “Almost every situation we encounter in life presents possibilities for growth... But these transformations require that a person be prepared to perceive unexpected opportunities.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

160. “The insight presumably occurs when a subconscious connection between ideas fits so well that it is forced to pop out into awareness, like a cork held underwater breaking out into the air after it is released.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

161. “Activity and reflection should ideally complement and support each other. Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

162. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

168. “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

169. “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

170. “Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that hap-pens can be a source of joy.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

181. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “If Diogenes with his lantern twenty-three centuries ago had difficulty finding an honest man, today he would have perhaps an even more troublesome time finding a happy one.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi