Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes

The ego is a fascinating monster.

When I would be myself, I was being big-headed. I was being egotistical. I was a megalomaniac, when it really was just having not to be a monkey for a few hours a day. And fulfilling the need to be a man.

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

Agreeable then to my present inclination, I formed the object of my own worship, which was no other than my own understanding.

Let not a man's self be to him all in all.

Isn't the origin of conflict ego? If there is no ego there is no becoming.

In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.

This god, this one word: I.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't go out to football games and drink beer and have a good time, I do it myself. But, at the same time, people are so apathetic and that shows me that they don't care about themselves. They have no self-image. Their image is projected to them via the television and that is where they make decisions about who they are according to what the public says they ought to be.

It is not recognized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially self-liberation - that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my owness.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

You’re a human, you should understand self-obsession.

Obsession with self is the motif of our time.

Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.

So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.

Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy.

If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.

After all, everyone's favorite subject is themselves.

Belonging to oneself--the whole essence of life lies in that.