Martin Seligman Quotes
Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think.
Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.
Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage
When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
Well-being cannot exist just in your own head. Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.
In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.
Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
I'm trying to broaden the scope of positive psychology well beyond the smiley face. Happiness is just one-fifth of what human beings choose to do.
People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
The clearer the rules and the limits enforced by parents, the higher the child's self-esteem. The more freedom the child had, the lower his self-esteem.
Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm follows
In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.
Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.
There is one aspect of happiness that's been well studied, and it's the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?
Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
Positive thinking is the notion that if you think good thoughts, things will work out well. Optimism is the feeling of thinking things will be well and be hopeful.
Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.
Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.
The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external.
What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?
Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.
The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.
Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.
Money, amazingly, is losing its power... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.
What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.
Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.
On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.
The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.
Pleasure is the least consequential... engagement and meaning are much more important.
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.
If you were an optimistic teen, then you'll be an optimist at 80. People's reactions to bad events are highly stable over a half century or more.
The word 'happiness' always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it's subjective.
One of my signature strengths is the love of learning, and by teaching, I have built it into the fabric of my life. I try to do some of it every day.
It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.