382 Quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. “He who desires but acts not,” wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, “Breeds pestilence.

One of the most basic delusions of our time is that home life takes care of itself naturally, and that the best strategy for dealing with it is to relax and let it take its course.

If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.

Creating meaning involves bringing order to the contents of the mind by integrating one’s actions into a unified flow experience.

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.

The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.

This paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.

There are natives of New Guinea who spend more time looking in the jungle for the colorful feathers they use for decoration in their ritual dances than they spend looking for food. And this is by no means a rare example: art, play, and ritual probably occupy more time and energy in most cultures than work.

Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.