Martin E.P. Seligman Quotes

First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.

Anger, unlike fear or sadness, is a moral emotion. It is "righteous." It aims not only to end the current trespass but to repair any damage done. It also aims to prevent further trespass by disarming, imprisoning, emasculating, or killing the trespasser.

Pessimistic labels lead to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts to change.

Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts.

While you can't control your experiences, you can control your explanations.

The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.

Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.

Practiced regularly (twice a day), relaxation or meditation prevents angry arousal.

When our grandparents failed, they had comfortable spiritual furniture to rest in. They had, for the most part, their relationship to God, their relationship to a nation they loved, their relationship to a community and a large extended family. Faith in God, community, nation, and the large extended family have all eroded in the last forty years, and the spiritual furniture that we used to sit in has become threadbare.

Exploders, people who have frequent outbursts of temper, also have more cancer than normal people.

Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:

[R]aising children ... was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.

Above all, during the interval, change from "ego orientation" to "task orientation." Think: "I know this seems like a personal insult, but it is not. It is a challenge to be overcome that calls on skills I have.

At my parents' house, I recently found a 1950 black-and-white snapshot of a chubby bespectacled warrior holding a three-and-a-half-foot freshly killed rattlesnake. The boy's smile is ecstatic.

The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors. When