Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “A community should be judged good not because it is technologically advanced, or swimming in material riches; it is good if it offers people a chance to enjoy as many aspects of their lives as possible, while allowing them to develop their potential in the pursuit of ever greater challenges.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

402. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

407. “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

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. “One of the major functions of every culture has been to shield its members from chaos, to reassure them of their importance and ultimate success.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

413. “Peasant women in Eastern Europe, for instance, were not judged to be ready for marriage unless they had learned to cook a different soup for each day of the year.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

415. “Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires.”

— 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. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

420. “It is for this reason that pleasure is so evanescent, and that the self does not grow as a consequence of pleasurable experiences. Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

421. “It is a circuitous path that begins with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

431. “Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J. S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.” It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “To many people activities like working or raising children provide more flow than playing a game or painting a picture, because these individuals have learned to perceive opportunities in such mundane tasks that others do not see.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “Learning to use time alone, instead of escaping from it, is especially important in our early years. Teenagers who can’t bear solitude disqualify themselves from later carrying out adult tasks that require serious mental preparation.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

441. “For example, teenagers enjoy impromptu interactions in which they try to “gross each other out,” or tell tall stories, or make fun of their teachers.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

442. “It is within each person’s power to decide whether its order will be restored from the outside, in ways over which we have no control, or whether the order will be the result of an internal pattern that grows organically from our skills and knowledge.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

443. “Without interest in the world, a desire to be actively related to it, a person becomes isolated into himself.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

444. “How can it help a person learn to rid himself of anxieties and fears and thus become free of the controls of society, whose rewards he can now take or leave? As suggested before, the way is through control over consciousness, which in turn leads to control over the quality of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

445. “We are always getting to live, as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, but never living. Or as poor Frances learned in the children’s story, it is always bread and jam tomorrow, never brad and jam today.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

446. “Changing external conditions might seem to work at first, but if a person is not in control of his consciousness, the old fears or desires will soon return, reviving previous anxieties. One.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

447. “Socializing of this kind mimics friendship relations, but it provides few of the benefits of the real thing. Everyone takes pleasure in occasionally passing the time of day chatting, but many people become extremely dependent on a daily “fix” of superficial contacts. This is especially true for individuals who cannot tolerate solitude, and who have little emotional support at home.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

448. “Holistic medicine and such books as Norman Cousins’s account of his successful fight against terminal illness and Dr. Bernie Siegel’s descriptions of self-healing are beginning to redress the abstractly materialist view of health that has become so prevalent in this century.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

449. “In many ways, competition is a quick way of developing complexity: “He who wrestles with us,” wrote Edmund Burke, “strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

450. “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