382 Quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Freeman Dyson said: “It is characteristic of scientific life that it is easy when you have a problem to work on. The hard part is finding your problem.

For Mark Strand, the poet’s responsibility to be a witness, a recorder of experience, is part of the broader responsibility we all have for keeping the universe ordered through our consciousness:.

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

Unfortunately, while free time might be a necessary condition for happiness, by itself it is not sufficient to guarantee it. Learning how to use it beneficially turns out to be more difficult than expected. Nor does it seem that more of a good thing is necessarily better; as is true of so many other things, what enriches life in small quantities might impoverish it in larger doses.

The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin con petire, which meant “to seek together.

Lack of true friends is often the main complaint of people confronting an emotional crisis in the second half of life.

Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person’s skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.

Whenever the outside world offers no mercy, an internal symbolic system can become a salvation.

Luckily, the world is absolutely full of interesting things to do. Only lack of imagination, or lack of energy, stand in the way. Otherwise each of us could be a poet or musician, an inventor or explorer, an amateur scholar, scientist, artist, or collector.