Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Every relationship requires a reorienting of attention, a repositioning of goals.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

352. “Altius, citius, fortius – is.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

353. “How to keep love fresh? The answer is the same as it is for any other activity. To be enjoyable, a relationship must become more complex. To become more complex, the partners must discover new potentialities in themselves and in each other. To discover these, they must invest attention in each other – so that they can learn what thoughts and feelings, what dreams reside in their partner’s mind. This in itself is a never-ending process, a lifetime’s task. After.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

354. “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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

355. “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.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

356. “Thoughts have to follow each other, or they get jumbled. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness. We cannot run, sing, and balance the checkbook simultaneously, because each one of these activities exhausts most of our capacity for attention.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

357. “I am free, free in my work, because I do whatever I want. If I don’t do something today I will do it tomorrow. I don’t have a boss, I am the boss of my own life. I have kept my freedom and I have fought for my freedom.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

358. “People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

359. “Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery – or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

360. “A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

361. “Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue – yet these could have been the best moments of his life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

362. “Early ethnographers have described North American Plains Indians so hypnotically involved in gambling with buffalo rib bones that losers would often leave the tepee without clothes in the dead of winter, having wagered away their weapons, horses, and wives as well.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

363. “The “battle” is not really against the self, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness. It is really a battle for the self; it is a struggle for establishing control over attention.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

364. “It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

365. “The profits made from the widespread dependence on illicit drugs are enriching murderers and terrorists. It seems possible that in the near future we shall be ruled by an oligarchy of former drug dealers, who are rapidly gaining wealth and power at the expense of law-abiding citizens. And in our sexual lives, by shedding the shackles of “hypocritical” morality, we have unleashed destructive viruses upon one another.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

366. “A similar distinction is that between discovered life themes, when a person writes the script for her actions out of personal experience and awareness of choice; and accepted life themes, when a person simply takes on a predetermined role from a script written long ago by others. Both.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

367. “Perhaps the most powerful effect flow theory could have in the public sector is in providing a blueprint for how institutions may be reformed so as to make them more conducive to optimal experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

368. “This simple truth – that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life – has been known for a long time; in fact, for as long as human records exist.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

369. “The meaning of life is meaning: whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

370. “Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one’s experience is all about.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

371. “The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

372. “Attention can be invested in innumerable ways, ways that can make life either rich or miserable.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

373. “Children who grow up in family situations that facilitate clarity of goals, feedback, feeling of control, concentration on the task at hand, intrinsic motivation, and challenge will generally have a better chance to order their lives so as to make flow possible.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

374. “Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

375. “If one does not expect perfect safety, recognizes that risks are inevitable, and succeeds in enjoying a less than ideally predictable world, the threat of insecurity will not have as great a chance of marring happiness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

376. “The names we use to describe personality traits – such as extrovert, high achiever, or paranoid – refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attention.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

377. “Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

378. “It is important to realize that seeking pleasure is a reflex response built into our genes for the preservation of the species, not for the purpose of our own personal advantage.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

379. “The reason it is possible to achieve such complete involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

380. “Setting goals. Becoming immersed in the activity. Paying attention to what is happening. Learning to enjoy the immediate experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

381. “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.” To swim in this case involves learning to distinguish the useful and the harmful forms of flow, and then making the most of the former while placing limits on the latter. The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people’s chances to enjoy theirs.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

382. “Esta paradoja de las expectativas en alza sugiere que mejorar la calidad de vida es una tarea inacabable.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

383. “Two terms describing states of social pathology apply also to conditions that make flow difficult to experience: anomie and alienation. Anomie –.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

384. “En nuestra vida podemos tener muy poca influencia sobre las fuerzas que interfieren en nuestro bienestar.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

385. “Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosophers of our century, described how he achieved personal happiness: “Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.” There could be no better short description of how to build for oneself an autotelic personality.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

386. “The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a very rare gift. Those who possess it are called “survivors,” and are said to have “resilience,” or “courage.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

387. “The lack of inner order manifests itself in the subjective condition that some call ontological anxiety, or existential dread. Basically, it is a fear of being, a feeling that there is no meaning to life and that existence is not worth going on with.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

388. “Leisure that uses up external resources, however, often requires less attention, and as a consequence it generally provides less memorable rewards.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

389. “The ballet dancer may fall, break her leg, and never make the perfect turn, and the chess player may be defeated and never become a champion. But at least in principle, in the world of flow perfection is attainable.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

390. “When a person is able to organize his or her consciousness so as to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life is inevitably going to improve, because, as in the case of Rico and Pam, even the usually boring routines of work become purposeful and enjoyable. In flow we are in control of our psychic energy, and everything we do adds order to consciousness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

391. “They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

392. “In the heyday of its material splendor, our society is suffering from an astonishing variety of strange ills.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

393. “We often call the manifestation of intentionality by other names, such as instinct, need, drive, or desire.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

394. “A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for – rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

395. “One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder – that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

396. “These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or a dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally, “amateur,” from the Latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly a “dilettante,” from the Latin delectare, “to find delight in,” was someone who enjoyed a given activity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

397. “To most people, the sheer wall of El Capitan in Yosemite valley is just a huge chunk of featureless rock. But to the climber it is an arena offering an endlessly complex symphony of mental and physical challenges.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

398. “Developing a discriminating palate, like any other skill, requires the investment of psychic energy. But the energy invested is returned many times over in a more complex experience. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

399. “The challenges of the activity are what force us to concentrate.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

400. “The same is true of all flow experiences: there is a mutual relationship between goals and the effort they require. Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal. One gets married because the spouse seems worthy of sharing one’s life with, but unless one then behaves as if this is true, the partnership will appear to lose value with time. All.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi