Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Altius, citius, fortius – is.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

374. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

376. “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

377. “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

378. “Although average Americans have plenty of free time, and ample access to leisure activities, they do not, as a result, experience flow often. Potentiality does not imply actuality, and quantity does not translate into quality.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

379. “Whosoever is delighted in solitude,” goes the old saying that Francis Bacon repeated, “is either a wild beast or a god.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

385. “Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “Yet, the elders said, at times the world became too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning.”

— 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. “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

398. “In making us work for its goals, society is assisted by some powerful allies: our biological needs and our genetic conditioning.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

399. “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

400. “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