Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Life Quotes

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One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Whatever the dictates of fashion, it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do lead a happier life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Problems are solved only when we devote a great deal of attention to them and in a creative way...to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going? Creativity is one answer to that question - It provides one of the most exciting models for living.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
When each of these three elements of vision-concern for excellence, for people and for the wider environment-are present, business is transformed from a tool for making profits into a creative, humane experiment for improving life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
If we agree that the bottom line of life is happiness, not success, then it makes perfect sense to say that it is the journey that counts, not reaching the destination.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The downside, of course, is that over time religions become encrusted with precepts and ideas that are the antithesis of soul, as each faith tries to protect its doctrines and institution instead of nurturing the evolution of consciousness. If one is not careful to distinguish the genuine insights of a religion from its irrelevant accretions, one can go through life following an inappropriate moral compass.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
To know oneself is the first step toward making flow a part of one's entire life. But just as there is no free lunch in the material economy, nothing comes free in the psychic one. If one is not willing to invest psychic energy in the internal reality of consciousness, and instead squanders it in chasing external rewards, one loses mastery of one's life, and ends up becoming a puppet of circumstances.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
To live means to experience-through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Our jobs determine to a large extent what our lives are like. Is what you do for a living making you ill? Does it keep you from becoming a more fully realized person? Do you feel ashamed of what you have to do at work? All too often, the answer to such questions is yes. Yet it does not have to be like that. Work can be one of the most joyful, most fulfilling aspects of life. Whether it will be or not depends on the actions we collectively take.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi