382 Quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.

Why is it that, despite having achieved previously undreamed-of miracles of progress, we seem more helpless in facing life than our less privileged ancestors were? The answer seems clear: while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.

What does this contradictory pattern mean?one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. 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. They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible.

If we are so rich, why aren't we happy?

Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.

There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital world

It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%-when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given.

Shift often from openness to closure.