Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

404. “What I “discovered” was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

405. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “If we are learning to be more assertive, we might inadvertently alienate our friends.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

414. “Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing it intentionally like a beam of energy – as do E. and R. in the previous examples – or by diffusing it in desultory, random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used. Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

415. “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

416. “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

417. “Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

418. “Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy. Feeling a breeze on a hot day, seeing a cloud reflected on the glass facade of a high-rise, working on a business deal, watching a child play with a puppy, drinking a glass of water can all be felt as deeply satisfying experiences that enrich one’s life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

429. “Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

430. “When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

431. “Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them,” said Epictetus.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

432. “Socialization, or the transformation of a human organism into a person who functions successfully within a particular social system, cannot be avoided.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

433. “The quality of experience of people who play with and transform the opportunities in their surroundings, as Joe did, is clearly more developed as well as more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to live within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot alter.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

434. “Involvement is greatly facilitated by the ability to concentrate. People who suffer from attentional disorders, who cannot keep their minds from wandering, always feel left out of the flow of life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

435. “Of course we don’t have to undertake any of these plans. But if we don’t, chances are, sooner or later, we will regret it.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

437. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

439. “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

440. “As Freud and many others before and after him have noted, civilization is built on the repression of individual desires.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

441. “Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience. They.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

442. “For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

443. “Part of the answer probably has to do with innate genetic causes.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

444. “When there are too many demands, options, challenges, we become anxious; when too few, we get bored.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

445. “Information enters consciousness either because we intend to focus attention on it or as a result of attentional habits based on biological or social instructions.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

446. “For the majority of people on this earth, life goals are simple: to survive, to leave children who will in turn survive, and, if possible, to do so with a certain amount of comfort and dignity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

447. “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

448. “The optimists claim that through the course of evolution the nervous system has become adept at “chunking” bits of information so that processing capacity is constantly expanded. Simple functions like adding a column of numbers or driving a car grow to be automated, leaving the mind free to deal with more data. We.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

449. “But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

450. “The pleasure we take in eating is an efficient way to ensure that the body will get the nourishment it needs. The pleasure of sexual intercourse is an equally practical method for the genes to program the body to reproduce and thereby to ensure the continuity of the genes.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi