382 Quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside,’ just by changing the contents of consciousness.

Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent.

To be distracted against one’s will is the surest sign that one is not in control.

Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the bounds of reason. If a person learns to control his instinctual desires, not because he has to, but because he wants to, he can enjoy himself without becoming addicted. A.

Entropy is the normal state of consciousness – a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.

And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can’t be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.

But no social change can come about until the consciousness of individuals is changed first. When a young man asked Carlyle how he should go about reforming the world, Carlyle answered, “Reform yourself. That way there will be one less rascal in the world.” The advice is still valid. 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.

Stern endorses Pascal’s maxim “To understand is to forgive.” In fact, one of the most exciting opportunities in being a writer, he feels, is to take a villain or criminal character and make him human by showing what caused him to be so.

A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life.