Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Altius, citius, fortius – is.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

354. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

356. “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

357. “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

358. “The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

359. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

361. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

369. “If you win these battles enough, that battle against yourself, at least for a moment, it becomes easier to win the battles in the world.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

380. “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

381. “As Francis Bacon remarked, quoting from a speech by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, “The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

382. “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

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. “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

385. “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

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

— 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. “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

389. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

391. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

393. “Each of us has a picture, however vague, of what we would like to accomplish before we die. How close we get to attaining this goal becomes the measure for the quality of our lives. If it remains beyond reach, we grow resentful or resigned; if it is at least in part achieved, we experience a sense of happiness and satisfaction.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

397. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

399. “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

400. “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