Top 280 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

252. “It is in the company of friends that we can most clearly experience the freedom of the self and learn who we really are. The ideal of a modern marriage is to have one’s spouse as a friend.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

253. “Few would argue that a simpler consciousness, no matter how harmonious, is preferable to a more complex one. While we might admire the serenity of the lion in repose, the tribesman’s untroubled acceptance of his fate, or the child’s wholehearted involvement in the present, they cannot offer a model for resolving our predicament. The order based on innocence is now beyond our grasp. Once the fruit is plucked from the tree of knowledge, the way back to Eden is barred forever.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

254. “Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live. They enjoy whatever they do, even if tedious or difficult; they are hardly ever bored, and they can take in stride anything that comes their way. Perhaps their greatest strength is that they are in control of their lives.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

255. “Yet even if their advice were to work, what would be the result afterward in the unlikely event that one did turn into a slim, well-loved, powerful millionaire? Usually what happens is that the person finds himself back at square one, with a new list of wishes, just as dissatisfied as before. What would really satisfy people is not getting slim or rich, but feeling good about their lives. In the quest for happiness, partial solutions don’t work.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

256. “If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

257. “Stern endorses Pascal’s maxim “To understand is to forgive.” In fact, one of the most exciting opportunities in being a writer, he feels, is to take a villain or criminal character and make him human by showing what caused him to be so.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

258. “All too often those who extol most loudly the virtues of selflessness turn out to be motivated by greed and ambition.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

259. “If the firms that employ an increasing majority of the population are driven solely to satisfy the owner’s greed at the expense of working conditions, of the stability of the community, and of the health of the environment, chances are that the quality of our lives will be worse than it is now.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

260. “Using this scheme, it can be said that games offer opportunities to go beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience in four different ways. In agonistic games, the participant must stretch her skills to meet the challenge provided by the skills of the opponents. The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin con petire, which meant “to seek together.” What each person seeks is to actualize her potential, and this task is made easier when others force us to do our best.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

261. “Freeman Dyson said: “It is characteristic of scientific life that it is easy when you have a problem to work on. The hard part is finding your problem.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

262. “While we cannot foresee the eventual results of creativity – of the attempt to impose our desires on reality, to become the main power that decides the destiny of every form of life on the planet – at least we can try to understand better what this force is and how it works. Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity. The result will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

263. “Those who always worry about what can go wrong might be well prepared against dangers but will never know how enjoyable life can be.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

264. “True, most married men are convinced that their lives are dedicated to the family, and from a material standpoint this might be true. But it takes more than food in the fridge and two cars in the garage to keep a family going.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

265. “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

266. “Unfortunately many serious thinkers devote all their mental effort to becoming well-known scholars, but in the meantime they forget their initial purpose in scholarship. In.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

267. “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

268. “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

269. “No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

270. “Instead of accepting the unity of purpose provided by genetic instructions or by the rules of society, the challenge for us is to create harmony based on reason and choice.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

271. “Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable. Yet many people ignore this capacity, and use their physical equipment as little as possible, leaving its ability to provide flow unexploited. When.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

272. “In reality, to achieve such an ordered mental condition is not as easy as it sounds. Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

273. “The apologists for the medium claim that all sorts of interesting information is provided by television. This is true, but as it is much easier to produce programs that titillate rather than elevate the viewer, what most people watch is unlikely to help in developing the self.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

274. “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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

275. “Of course my own self exists solely in my own consciousness; in that of others who know me there will be versions of it, most of them probably unrecognizable likenesses of the “original” – myself as I see me.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

276. “In the 1960s, when abstract expressionism was the reigning style, those art students who tended to be sullen, brooding, and antisocial were thought by their teachers to be very creative.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

277. “If I were starving, I would have taken her money. But since I am not, why should I make a deal that isn’t any fun? I enjoy the clash of wits involved in bargaining, when two persons try to outdo each other with ruses and with eloquence. She didn’t even flinch. She didn’t know any better. She didn’t pay me the respect of assuming that I was going to try to take advantage of her. If I had sold those pieces to that woman at that ridiculous price, I would have felt cheated.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

278. “Decent” people the world over do not spend too much energy on the task of sexual reproduction, or on the practices that have been built on it. Romance resembles sports in this respect as well: instead of doing it personally, most people are content to hear about it or watch a few experts perform it. A.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

279. “The body is like a probe full of sensitive devices that tries to obtain what information it can from the awesome reaches of space.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

280. “Creative people are constantly surprised. They don’t assume that they understand what is happening around them, and they don’t assume that anybody else does either. They question the obvious – not out of contrariness but because they see the shortcomings of accepted explanations before the rest of us do. They sense problems before they are generally perceived and are able to define what they are.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

281. “When do we get to the interesting part – the tortured souls, the impossible dreams, the agony and the ecstasy of creation?”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

282. “I am fooling around not doing anything, which probably means that this is a creative period, although of course you don’t know until afterward. I think that it is very important to be idle. I mean, they always say that Shakespeare was idle between plays. I am not comparing myself to Shakespeare, but people who keep themselves busy all of the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

283. “The important thing is that the energy is under their own control.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

284. “We have learned how to develop five-minute and even one-minute managers. But we would do better to ask ourselves what it takes to be an executive who helps build a better future.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

285. “Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things. Adults, themselves often deluded by infatuation with fatuous models, conspire in the deception. They make serious tasks seem dull and hard, and frivolous ones exciting and easy. Schools generally fial to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the routine of literature or history rather than the adventure.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

286. “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

287. “The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi