Top 500 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “Agon includes games that have competition as their main feature, such as most sports and athletic events;.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

402. “A starting point would be to say that one society is “better” than another if a greater number of its people have access to experiences that are in line with their goals. A second essential criterion would specify that these experiences should lead to the growth of the self on an individual level, by allowing as many people as possible to develop increasingly complex skills.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

404. “The same is true of all flow experiences: there is a mutual relationship between goals and the effort they require. Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal. One gets married because the spouse seems worthy of sharing one’s life with, but unless one then behaves as if this is true, the partnership will appear to lose value with time. All.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “But if one assumes that people have a choice in how they respond to external events, in what meaning they attribute to suffering, then one can interpret the constructive response as normal and the neurotic one as a failure to rise to the challenge, as a breakdown in the ability to flow.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

411. “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

412. “What matters is not what he has now, but what he might obtain if he does as others want him to do. Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

414. “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

415. “Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

416. “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

417. “But a cultivated palate provides many opportunities for flow if one approaches eating – and cooking – in a spirit of adventure and curiosity, exploring the potentials of food for the sake of the experience rather than as a showcase for one’s expertise. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

418. “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

419. “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

420. “This is where the presumed advantage of a contemplative life comes in. Detached reflection upon experience, a realistic weighing of options and their consequences, have long been held to be the best approach to a good life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “We have come to accept that our morality simply no longer has currency outside our own culture.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

425. “Almost any kind of feedback can be enjoyable, provided it is logically related to a goal in which one has invested psychic energy. If.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

426. “In the past few centuries economic rationality has een so successful that we have come to take for granted that the “bottom line” of any human effort is to be measured in dollars and cents. But an exclusively economic approach to life is profoundly irrational; the true bottom line consists in the quality and complexity of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

427. “Even the most highly respected physicist, artist, or politician becomes a hollow bore and ceases to enjoy life if all he can interest himself in is his limited role in the universe.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

428. “Of the many causes that shaped St. Francis’s actions, a primary one was the belief that his actions mattered, and that he had a responsibility to change the world around him. This belief, in itself, is a “cause.” The idea of free will is a self-fulfilling prophecy; those who abide by it are liberated from the absolute determinism of external forces. Chance.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

429. “The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

430. “All social controls, for instance, are ultimately based on a threat to the survival instinct. The people of an oppressed country obey their conquerors because they want to go on living.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

431. “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

432. “Oppression is often made possible by a new technological advance – sometimes as dramatic as the introduction of farming, sometimes as apparently trivial as the stirrup.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

434. “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

435. “A person who is healthy, rich, strong, and powerful has no greater odds of being in control of his consciousness than one who is sickly, poor, weak, and oppressed. The difference between someone who enjoys life and someone who is overwhelmed by it is a product of a combination of such external factors and the way a person has come to interpret them – that is, whether he sees challenges as threats or as opportunities for action.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

436. “Unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs in fact do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance. This.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

437. “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

438. “Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue – yet these could have been the best moments of his life.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

439. “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

440. “To the extent that a glamorous ad makes us salivate for the product sold or that a frown from the boss spoils the day, we are not free to determine the content of experience.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

441. “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

442. “The fathers of the Church well understood that infatuation with the pleasures of the flesh could easily drain psychic energy away from other goals.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

443. “Having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. It frees us from the tyranny of the present, and makes it possible for consciousness to revisit former times.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

444. “Narcissistic individuals, who are mainly concerned with protecting their self, fall apart when the external conditions turn threatening. The ensuing panic prevents them from doing what they must do; their attention turns inward in an effort to restore order in consciousness, and not enough remains to negotiate outside reality.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

445. “Energy is power, but power is only a means. The goals to which it is applied can make life either richer or more painful.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

446. “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

447. “Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces. It is no longer necessary to struggle for goals that always seem to recede into the future, to end each boring day with the hope that tomorrow, perhaps, something good will happen. Instead of forever straining for the tantalizing prize dangled just out of reach, one begins to harvest the genuine rewards of living.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

448. “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

449. “Poets make much of the majestic eagle soaring freely among the snowy peaks. But the eyes of the eagle are generally focused on the ground, searching for rodents lurking in the shadows. The lives of much of humanity could be summed up in similar terms. Let.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi