Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes

Inconsistency itself breeds vitality.

Personally, I rather think that if you're not creative you've got a problem on your hands. If you are creative you've got a double problem.

The magical story is not a microscope but a mirror, not a drop of water but a well. It is not simply one thing or two, but a multitude. It is at once both lucid and opaque, it accepts both dark and light, speaks to youth and old age.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Inconsistency is the jewel of the American people.

If I had to express in one word what makes their [creative individuals'] personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."

I am large, I contain multitudes

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life

The minute you have more than one voice, you have more possibilities opening up. You have all the molecules in all of those bodies and their make up interacting.

Reality has always had too many heads.

Dark with excessive bright.

Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.

The world is full of contradiction.

We are not consistent. We have both these dark sides and some light as well.

Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!

A moment might be a thousand different things.

The motivations of men. They never make sense. And they always make sense.

CSNY is a little like putting seven pounds of stuff in a three pound bag.