382 Quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Knowing oneself is not so much a question of discovering what is present in one's self, but rather the creation of who one wants to be.

It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.

It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.

In knowledge-intensive business settings, where every manager has to oversee massive amounts of information as well as people, facilitating the use of psychic energy becomes a primary concern.

The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow - the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.

Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.

...if we expended all our energies solely on taking care of our own needs we would stop growing. In that respect what we call "soul" can be viewed as the surplus energy that can be invested into change and transformation. As such, it is the cutting edge of evolution.

An ideal organization is one in which each worker's potentialities find room for expression.