People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.
"Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi" is the Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He is the former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College.
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous psychologists! More Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Wikipedia.When someday I die, Please tell those whom I know That I ebbed with the Flow.
Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.
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.
It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.
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.
There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.
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.
Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
Music is usually resorted to as a form of self-therapy when you?re not involved enough in what you?re doing so that part of your mind needs to be distracted from what otherwise would become boring.
A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.
A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.
Alternatives to Materialism. I lived my life in an ivory tower, and business was to be held at an arm's length.
Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.
People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
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.
The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.
Studying creativity is not an elite distraction, but provides one of the most exciting models for living.
Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands and potential frustrations.
We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.
Copyright © 2024 Electric Goat Media. All Rights Reserved.