382 Quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.

You can drive a car all your life without knowing how the engine works, because the goal of driving is to get from one place to the next, regardless how it's done. But to live without understanding how we think, why we feel the way we feel, what directs our actions is to miss what is most important in life, which is the experience itself.

..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.

It might be true that it is “quality time” that counts, but after a certain point quantity has a bearing on quality.

Breaking out of the fatalistic acceptance of genetic or historical programming requires, at the very least, a belief in freedom and self-determination.

People who view television more often than the average tend also to have worse jobs and worse relationships. In a large scale study in Germany, it was found that the more often people report reading books, the more flow experiences they claimed to have. While the opposite trend was found for watching television. The most flow was reported by individuals who read a lot and watched little TV. The least by those who read seldom and watched often.

Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it’s dead. But we’re allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures.

After curiosity, this quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart in college from their peers. Without this quality, they could not have sustained the hard work, the ‘perspiration.’ Curiosity and drive are in many ways the yin and the yang that need to be combined in order to achieve something new.

Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things. Adults, themselves often deluded by infatuation with fatuous models, conspire in the deception. They make serious tasks seem dull and hard, and frivolous ones exciting and easy. Schools generally fial to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the routine of literature or history rather than the adventure.