Quotes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

for real growth, it is necessary to find people whose opinions are interesting and whose conversation is stimulating. A more difficult, but in the long run even more useful, skill to acquire is the ability to tolerate solitude, and to even enjoy it.

Suffering is not bad: It helps you very much. Do you know a novel about happiness? Or a film about happy people? We are a perverse race, only suffering interests us.

you have to assume that it can be done. If you don't assume that, you won't even try. And I always assume that not only it can be done, but I can do it.

The popular assumption is that no skills are involved in enjoying free time, and that anybody can do it. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite: free time is more difficult to enjoy than work.

We value money because to a certain extent it liberates us from the constraints of life by making it possible to have free time to do in it what we want.

If one reads the biographies of physicists like Bohr, Heisenberg, Chandrashekhar, and Bethe, one gets the impression that without hikes in the mountains and the vision of night skies their science would not have amounted to much.

But personalizing patterns of action helps to free the mind from the expectations that make demands on attention and allows intense concentration on matters that count.

It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life.

When attention is focused, minor aches and pains have no chance to register in consciousness.

Someone who is motivated solely by the desire to become rich and famous might struggle hard to get ahead but will rarely have enough inducement to work beyond what is necessary, to venture beyond what is already known.

Traditionally, men's identity and self-respect have been based on the ability to obtain energy from the environment for their own and their families' use. Whether the satisfaction a man gets from doing a necessary job is partly genetically programmed, or is entirely learned from the culture, the fact is that more or less everywhere a man who is not a provider is to some extent a misfit.

If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try; If we don't, it doesn't matter, but we'd better start to die.

Passive leisure becomes a problem when a person uses it as the principal-or the only-strategy to fill up free time.

Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.

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.

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 things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.

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.

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

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

It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.

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.

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.

success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue...as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.