Quotes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

On bad days I have seventeen or twenty-four E-mail messages.

Another force motivates us, and it is more primitive and more powerful than the urge to create: the force of entropy. This too is a survival mechanism built into our genes by evolution. It gives us pleasure when we are comfortable, when we relax, when we can get away with feeling good without expending energy.

In a really enjoyable game, the players are balanced on the fine line between boredom and anxiety. The same is true when work, or a conversation, or a relationship is going well.

How to avoid the danger of polarizing life into work that is meaningless because it is unfree, and leisure that is meaningless because it has no purpose?

This does not mean that creative persons are hyperactive, always "on," constantly churning away. In fact, they often take rests and sleep a lot. The important thing is that the energy is under their own control—it is not controlled by the calendar, the clock, an external schedule. When necessary they can focus it like a laser beam; when it is not, they immediately start recharging their batteries.

Work as we know it now is a very recent historical development. It didn't exist before the great agricultural revolutions that made intensive farming possible about twelve thousand years ago.

try very hard to be at the cutting edge of problems. Very often that puts me so far out in front that people are upset about it, but that's OK.

what you are doing is sort of architectural. You have to have a design in view, in which you design a chapter, or a proof of a theorem, as the case may be. Then you have to put it together out of words or out of symbols as the case may be, but if you don't have a clear architecture in mind then the thing won't end up being any good.

it's very clear to me that my ability to think and write at the same time depends on the flow of ink. The thing I enjoy most is the flow of my own ideas and getting them down on paper. I will not write with a ballpoint pen, because it doesn't really flow. That's why I use a fountain pen. And only a fountain pen that really works very well.

If you are interested in something you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it.

Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process. Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work. The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it, and the easier it is to get distracted.

As one focuses on any segment of reality, a potentially infinite range of opportunities for action-physical, mental, or emotional-is revealed for our skills to engage with. There is never a good excuse for being bored.

Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity.

Most events in consciousness are built from culturally defined contents as well as from personal meanings developed throughout an individual's life. Thus, two persons can never be expected to have the same experience, and the farther apart in time and place they are, the more the details of the two experiences will differ.

The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used.

Scientists often describe the autotelic aspects of their work as the exhilaration that comes from the pursuit of truth and of beauty. What they seem to describe, however, is the joy of discovery, of solving a problem, of being able to express an observed relationship in a simple and elegant form. So what is rewarding is not a mysterious and ineffable goal but the activity of science itself. It is the pursuit that counts, not the attainment.

In the United States and the other technologically advanced societies, individualism and materialism have almost completely prevailed over allegiance to the community and to spiritual values.

Unfortunately, many people find the only challenges they can respond to are violence, gambling, random sex, or drugs. Some of these experiences can be enjoyable, but these episodes of flow do not add up to a sense of satisfaction and happiness over time. Pleasure does not lead to creativity, but soon turns into addiction—the thrall of entropy.

Act always as if the future of the Universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.

The word success is an ambiguous word. Success with respect to the outside? Or success with respect to oneself? And if it is a success with respect to the outside, then how do you evaluate it? Very often outside success is irrelevant, wrong, and misplaced. So how can one talk about it? Externally, you may think I am successful because people write about some aspects of my work. But that is an external judgment. And I have no idea as to how to value that judgment.

The real story of creativity is more difficult and strange than many overly optimistic accounts have claimed.

Someone who is relatively more introverted may wish to perfect his act before stepping before the limelight. A more extroverted person may enjoy competitive pressures from the very beginning of her career.

I feel that all the various features of Nature around me…provoked an emotional reaction in the depth of my soul, which I have tried to transcribe in music" wrote Franz Liszt during his stay here.

It sounds somewhat ridiculous to say that one of the problems we face at this point in history is that we haven't learned how to spend free time in a sensible way.