Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “We have seen that experience depends on the way we invest psychic energy – on the structure of attention. This, in turn, is related to goals and intentions. These processes are connected to each other by the self, or the dynamic mental representation we have of the entire system of our goals. These are the pieces that must be maneuvered if we wish to improve things.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

205. “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

206. “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

207. “To transform the biological necessity of feeding into a flow experience, one must begin by paying attention to what one eats. It is astonishing – as well as discouraging – when guests swallow lovingly prepared food without any sign of having noticed its virtues. What.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

208. “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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

209. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

212. “Lack of true friends is often the main complaint of people confronting an emotional crisis in the second half of life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

214. “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

215. “Luckily, the world is absolutely full of interesting things to do. Only lack of imagination, or lack of energy, stand in the way. Otherwise each of us could be a poet or musician, an inventor or explorer, an amateur scholar, scientist, artist, or collector.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

216. “The sacred books of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and the Veda are the best repositories of the ideas that mattered most to our ancestors, and to ignore them is an act of childish conceit. But it is equally naive to believe that whatever was written down in the past contains an absolute truth that lasts forever.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

217. “Without enjoyment life can be endured, and it can even be pleasant. But it can be so only precariously, depending on luck and the cooperation of the external environment. To gain personal control over the quality of experience, however, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

218. “If goals are well chosen, and if we have the courage to abide by them despite opposition, we shall be so focused on the actions and events around us that we won’t have the time to be unhappy.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

219. “In knowledge-intensive business settings, where every manager has to oversee massive amounts of information as well as people, facilitating the use of psychic energy becomes a primary concern.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

221. “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

222. “Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

223. “People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

224. “If we assume, however, that the desire to achieve optimal experience is the foremost goal of every human being, the difficulties of interpretation raised by cultural relativism become less severe. Each social system can then be evaluated in terms of how much psychic entropy it causes, measuring that disorder not with reference to the ideal order of one or another belief system, but with reference to the goals of the members of that society.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

225. “Unfortunately, while free time might be a necessary condition for happiness, by itself it is not sufficient to guarantee it. Learning how to use it beneficially turns out to be more difficult than expected. Nor does it seem that more of a good thing is necessarily better; as is true of so many other things, what enriches life in small quantities might impoverish it in larger doses.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

226. “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

227. “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

228. “It is impossible for partners not to grow bored unless they work to discover new challenges in each other’s company, and learn appropriate skills for enriching the relationship. Initially.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

229. “This cultural hubris, or overweening presumption about what we are entitled to from a universe that is basically insensitive to human needs, generally leads to trouble. The unwarranted sense of security sooner or later results in a rude awakening. 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

230. “A person can feel pleasure without any effort, if the appropriate centers in his brain are electrically stimulated, or as a result of the chemical stimulation of drugs. But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

231. “Over the course of human evolution, as each group of people became gradually aware of the enormity of its isolation in the cosmos and of the precariousness of its hold on survival, it developed myths and beliefs to transform the random, crushing forces of the universe into manageable, or at least understandable, patterns.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

232. “One of the simplest ways to decrease the frequency of negative thoughts is by selectively moderating expectations.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

233. “Thus we might think of consciousness as intentionally ordered information. This.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

234. “The record seems to suggest that a society begins to rely heavily on leisure-and especially on passive leisure-only when it has become incapable of offering meaningful productive occupation to its members.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

235. “If you’re alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

236. “Control over consciousness cannot be institutionaliz ed. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

237. “As this example suggests, we can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

238. “Much has been written about what makes families work. The consensus is that families that support the emotional well-being and growth of their members combine two almost opposite traits. They combine discipline with spontaneity, rules with freedom, high expectations with unstinting love.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

239. “One of the most basic delusions of our time is that home life takes care of itself naturally, and that the best strategy for dealing with it is to relax and let it take its course.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

240. “There are natives of New Guinea who spend more time looking in the jungle for the colorful feathers they use for decoration in their ritual dances than they spend looking for food. And this is by no means a rare example: art, play, and ritual probably occupy more time and energy in most cultures than work.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

241. “For better or for worse, at this time science is still the most trustworthy mirror of reality, and we ignore it only at our peril.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

242. “At certain times in history cultures have taken it for granted that a person wasn’t fully human unless he or she learned to master thoughts and feelings.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

243. “Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

244. “To realize the body’s potential for flow is relatively easy. It does not require special talents or great expenditures of money. Everyone can greatly improve the quality of life by exploring one or more previously ignored dimensions of physical abilities. Of.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

245. “Someone who is in harmony no matter what he does, no matter what is happening to him, knows that his psychic energy is not being wasted on doubt, regret, guilt, and fear, but is always usefully employed.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

246. “As long as one strives to become a gourmet or a connoisseur of wines because it is the “in” thing to do, striving to master an externally imposed challenge, then taste may easily turn sour. But a cultivated palate provides many opportunities for flow if one approaches eating – and cooking – in a spirit of adventure and curiosity, exploring the potentials of food for the sake of the experience rather than as a showcase for one’s expertise.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

247. “By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we not try to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that mean they should freely express violence? We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

248. “The gods of the Greeks were like helpless children compared to humankind today and the powers we now wield.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

249. “Unconditional acceptance is especially important to children. If parents threaten to withdraw their love from a child when he fails to measure up, the child’s natural playfulness will be gradually replaced by chronic anxiety.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

250. “Before investing great amounts of energy in a goal, it pays to raise the fundamental questions: Is this something I really want to do? Is it something I enjoy doing? Am I likely to enjoy it in the foreseeable future? Is the price that I – and others – will have to pay worth it? Will I be able to live with myself if I accomplish it?”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi