Martin Seligman Quotes

Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm follows

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.

Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.

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.

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.

When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.

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.

Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage

The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and if God comes at the end, such a life is sacred.

Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.

Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.

When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.

You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.

Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.

We're not prisoners of the past.

So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose

Reaching beyond where you are is really important.

The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.

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.

Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.

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.

People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.

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?