Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “Another universally enjoyable activity is being with other people. Socializing might at first sight appear to be an exception to the statement that one needs to use skills to enjoy an activity, for it does not seem that gossiping or joking around with another person requires particular abilities. But of course, it does; as so many shy people know, if a person feels self-conscious, he or she will dread establishing informal contacts, and avoid company whenever possible.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

354. “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

355. “We grow up believing that what counts most in our lives is that which will occur in the future.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

356. “Although, as we have seen, people generally long to leave their places of work and get home, ready to put their hard-earned free time to good use, all too often they have no idea what to do there.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

357. “Every relationship requires a reorienting of attention, a repositioning of goals.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

358. “The same person can meditate in the morning and shut out all sensory experience, and then look at a great work of art in the afternoon; either way he may be transformed by the same sense of exhilaration.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

359. “In discarding a literal religious explanation, it becomes easy to discredit the hard-won wisdom often bundled up with it.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

361. “It stands to reason, however, that a child who has been abused, or who has been often threatened with the withdrawal of parental love – and unfortunately we are becoming increasingly aware of what a disturbing proportion of children in our culture are so mistreated – will be so worried about keeping his sense of self from coming apart as to have little energy left to pursue intrinsic rewards.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

362. “Paradoxically, this sense of humility – the recognition that one’s goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, and that to succeed one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer – is a hallmark of strong people.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

363. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

365. “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

366. “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

367. “The concentration of the flow experience – together with clear goals and immediate feedback – provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

368. “Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

369. “Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did. Opportunities alone, however, are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of them.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

370. “Those who know how to transform a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled will be able to enjoy themselves, and emerge stronger from the ordeal.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

371. “It is usual to explain the motivation of those who enjoy dangerous activities as some sort of pathological need: they are trying to exorcise a deep-seated fear, they are compensating, they are compulsively reenacting an Oedipal fixation, they are “sensation seekers.” While such motives may be occasionally involved, what is most striking, when one actually speaks to specialists in risk, is how their enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, but from their ability to minimize it.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

372. “Altius, citius, fortius – is.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

373. “Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganisation of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

374. “But the true believer is not really interacting with the belief system; he usually lets his psychic energy be absorbed by it. From this submission nothing new can come; consciousness may attain a welcome order, but it will be an order imposed rather than achieved.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

376. “There are no strict formulas, however, for how much time people actually have to work. It seems, for instance, that the early hunter-gatherers, like their present-day descendants living in the inhospitable deserts of Africa and Australia, spent only three to five hours each day on what we would call working – providing for food, shelter, clothing, and tools. They spent the rest of the day in conversation, resting, or dancing.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

377. “It does not matter whether we see or we not-see, as long as we are in control of what is happening to us. The same person can meditate in the morning and shut out all sensory experience, and then look at a great work of art in the afternoon; either way he may be transformed by the same sense of exhilaration.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

378. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

380. “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

381. “But increasingly the emphasis has been to value behavior over subjective states; what is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience. Consequently it has become embarrassing to be called a dilettante, even though to be a dilettante is to achieve what counts most – the enjoyment one’s actions provide. It.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

382. “But a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free. His thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television. He will be at the mercy of “experts.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

383. “Over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come – every thought, memory, feeling, or action. It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

384. “In John Fletcher’s words, “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

385. “But even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious “leisure” time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

386. “But the point is still valid: human relations are malleable, and if a person has the appropriate skills their rules can be transformed. But.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

387. “Teenagers, who swing from one threat to their fragile evolving personhood to another in quick succession throughout the day, especially depend on the soothing patterns of sound to restore order in their consciousness. But so do many adults. One.”

— 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. “Purpose gives direction to one’s efforts, but it does not necessarily make life easier. Goals can lead into all sorts of trouble, at which point one gets tempted to give them up and find some less demanding script by which to order one’s actions. The price one pays for changing goals whenever opposition threatens is that while one may achieve a more pleasant and comfortable life, it is likely that it will end up empty and void of meaning.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

390. “The strategy consists in extracting from the order achieved by past generations patterns that will help avoid disorder in one’s own mind. There is much knowledge – or well-ordered information – accumulated in culture, ready for this use. Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy, and religion are there for anyone to see as examples of how harmony can be imposed on chaos. Yet so many people ignore them, expecting to create meaning in their lives by their own devices.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

391. “To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

392. “When a person’s psychic energy coalesces into a life theme, consciousness achieves harmony.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

393. “As long as a significant segment of society has few opportunities to encounter meaningful challenges, and few chances to develop the skills necessary to benefit from them, we must expect that violence and crime will attract those who cannot find their way to more complex autotelic experiences.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

394. “The same effect can be achieved in different ways, either through perfecting a severe mental discipline as in Yoga or through cultivating constant spontaneity as in Zen. But the intended result is identical: to free inner life from the threat of chaos, on the one hand, and from the rigid conditioning of biological urges, on the other, and hence to become independent from the social controls that exploit both.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

395. “Work not only transforms the environment by building bridges across rivers and cultivating barren plains; it also transforms the worker from an animal guided by instincts into a conscious, goal-directed, skillful person.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

396. “Unfortunately, too many adults feel that once they have hit twenty or thirty – or certainly forty – they are entitled to relax in whatever habitual grooves they have established.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

397. “In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious “leisure” time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible. The largest part of free time – almost half of it for American adults – is spent in front of the television set. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

398. “One can survive solitude, but only if one finds ways of ordering attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mind.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

399. “An open stance makes it possible for a person to be objective, to be aware of alternative possibilities, to feel a part of the surrounding world.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

400. “But it seems clear that an increasing majority are not being helped by traditional religions and belief systems. Many are unable to separate the truth in the old doctrines from the distortions and degradations that time has added, and since they cannot accept error, they reject the truth as well. Others are so desperate for some order that they cling rigidly to whatever belief happens to be at hand – warts and all – and become fundamentalist Christians, or Muslims, or communists.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi