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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

410. “Work not only transforms the environment by building bridges across rivers and cultivating barren plains; it also transforms the worker from an animal guided by instincts into a conscious, goal-directed, skillful person.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

411. “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

412. “In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious “leisure” time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible. The largest part of free time – almost half of it for American adults – is spent in front of the television set. The.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

414. “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

415. “But it seems clear that an increasing majority are not being helped by traditional religions and belief systems. Many are unable to separate the truth in the old doctrines from the distortions and degradations that time has added, and since they cannot accept error, they reject the truth as well. Others are so desperate for some order that they cling rigidly to whatever belief happens to be at hand – warts and all – and become fundamentalist Christians, or Muslims, or communists.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

417. “The same effect can be achieved in different ways, either through perfecting a severe mental discipline as in Yoga or through cultivating constant spontaneity as in Zen. But the intended result is identical: to free inner life from the threat of chaos, on the one hand, and from the rigid conditioning of biological urges, on the other, and hence to become independent from the social controls that exploit both.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

418. “A self that is only differentiated – not integrated – may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person whose self is based exclusively on integration will be connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

419. “If a person is unwilling to adjust personal goals when starting a relationship, then a lot of what subsequently happens in that relationship will produce disorder in the person’s consciousness, because novel patterns of interaction will conflict with old patterns of expectation.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

420. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

422. “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

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “The perfect society would be able to strike a healthy balance between the spiritual and material worlds, but short of aiming for perfection, we can look toward Eastern religions for guidance in how to achieve control over consciousness.”

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

431. “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

432. “What counts is to set a goal, to concentrate one’s psychic energy, to pay attention to the feedback, and to make certain that the challenge is appropriate to one’s skill. Sooner or later the interaction will begin to hum, and the flow experience follows.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

433. “If being alone is seen as a chance to accomplish goals that cannot be reached in the company of others, then instead of feeling lonely, a person will enjoy solitude and might be able to learn new skills in the process. On the other hand, if solitude is seen as a condition to be avoided at all costs instead of as a challenge, the person will panic and resort to distractions that cannot lead to higher levels of complexity.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

434. “Each biblical parable, for instance, tries to encode the hard-won experience of many individuals over unknown eons of time.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

435. “The “autotelic self” is one that easily translates potential threats into enjoyable challenges, and therefore maintains its inner harmony.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

436. “Much of what we label juvenile delinquency – car theft, vandalism, rowdy behavior in general – is motivated by the same need to have flow experiences not available in ordinary life. 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

437. “From our point of view, what is important to realize is that attentional disorders not only interfere with learning, but effectively rule out the possibility of experiencing flow as well. When a person cannot control psychic energy, neither learning nor true enjoyment is possible.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

438. “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

439. “Again, the importance of personally taking control of the direction of learning from the very first steps cannot be stressed enough. If a person feels coerced to read a certain book, to follow a given course because that is supposed to be the way to do it, learning will go against the grain. But if the decision is to take that same route because of an inner feeling of rightness, the learning will be relatively effortless and enjoyable. When.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

440. “Because our present social arrangements, however, do not provide adequate challenges for the skills teenagers have, they must discover opportunities for action outside those sanctioned by adults.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

441. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J. S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

442. “In other words, with nothing to do, the mind is unable to prevent negative thoughts from elbowing their way to center stage.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

443. “Our perceptions about our lives are the outcome of many forces that shape experience, each having an impact on whether we feel good or bad.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

444. “Those who try to make life better for everyone without having learned to control their own lives first usually end up making things worse all around.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

445. “Friendships allow us to express parts of our beings that we seldom have the opportunity to act out otherwise.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

446. “A more substantive potential use of words to enhance our lives is the lost art of conversation.”

— 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. “Practically every desire that has become part of human nature, from sexuality to aggression, from a longing for security to a receptivity to change, has been exploited as a source of social control by politicians, churches, corporations, and advertisers.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi