Quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”

“If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life. To do so is fairly easy in princ...”

“Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing timesalthough such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have wor...”

“These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on ones own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercis...”

“..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they b...”

“It might be true that it is quality time that counts, but after a certain point quantity has a bearing on quality.”

“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.”

“By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we not try to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that me...”

“Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things. Adults, themselves often deluded by infatuation with fatuous models, conspire in the decep...”

“After curiosity, this quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart in college from their peers. Without this quality, they could not ha...”

“Creative people are constantly surprised. They dont assume that they understand what is happening around them, and they dont assume that anybody else does either. They question the obviousnot out o...”

“A large majority of our respondents were inspired by a tension in their domain that became obvious when looked at from the perspective of another domain. Even though they do not think of themselves...”

“The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings."--(psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls "flow")”

“But shortcuts are dangerous we cannot delude ourselves that our knowledge is further along than it actually is. ”

“All our contemporaries...had some big ideology to live for. Everybody thought he had to either fight in Spain or die for something else, and most of us had to be in prison for one reason or another...”

“In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the un...”

“Try to be surprised by something every day. It could be something you see, hear, or read about. Stop to look at the unusual car parked at the curb, taste the new item on the cafeteria menu, actuall...”

“Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be r...”

“To keep up interest in a subject, a teenager has to enjoy working in it. If the teacher makes the task of learning excessively difficult, the student will feel too frustrated and anxious to really ...”

“Few would argue that a simpler consciousness, no matter how harmonious, is preferable to a more complex one. While we might admire the serenity of the lion in repose, the tribesmans untroubled acce...”