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It is essential to learn to enjoy life. It really does not make sense to go through the motions of existence if one does not appreciate as much of it as possible.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Much
Essentials
Really
Appreciate
Make
Existence
Life
Possible
Enjoy
Learn
Sense
Motions
Doe
Essential

More quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.
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The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
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Some individuals have developed such strong internal standards that they no longer need the opinion of others to judge whether they have performed a task well or not. The ability to give objective feedback to oneself is in fact the mark of the expert.
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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.
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Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
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Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not 'wasting time.
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Contrary to what most of us believe, happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen, and it results from doing our best. Feeling fulfilled when we live up to our potentialities is what motivates differentiation and leads to evolution.
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Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.
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It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.
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The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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The more a person feels skilled, the more her moods will improve while the more challenges that are present, the more her attention will become focused and concentrated.
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People generally report higher levels of stress, depression, and tension after watching TV. It seems that TV's main virtue is that it occupies the mind undemandingly.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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
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It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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If a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble, that the work will enable people to connect with something large - more permanent than their material existence - people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.
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Often we don't have a good notion of what our talents are, because we have never had a chance to try them out.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Competition is an easy way to get into flow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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..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 become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be they come to believe they have no other options.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi