Martin Seligman Quotes

Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology.

The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.

If the point of the inner-child movement is to cure adult problems, it doesn't work. Reliving childhood traumas gives you a nice afterglow, but it lasts only for hours or days. There is no evidence it changes adult problems.

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.

Money, amazingly, is losing its power ... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.

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.

P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements of what free people chose to do. Pretty much everything else is in service of one of or more of these goals. That's the human dashboard.

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.

I have spent most of my life working with mental illness. I have been president of the world's largest association of mental-illness workers, and I am all for more funding for mental-health care and research - but not in the vain hope that it will curb violence.

Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair ...

Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.

Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die.

Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else.

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

I don't mind being wrong, and I don't mind changing my mind.

Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.

We deprive our children, our charges, of persistence. What I am trying to say is that we need to fail, children need to fail, we need to feel sad, anxious and anguished. If we impulsively protect ourselves and our children, as the feel-good movement suggests, we deprive them of learning-persistence skills.

One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we've been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the 'I' gets bigger and bigger, and the 'we' gets smaller and smaller.

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.

Sexual performance problems, such as impotence and frigidity, are 70 to 90 percent changeable. But a homosexual who wants to be a heterosexual - that's close to unchangeable. And a transsexual - say a man who believes he's really a woman in a man's body - is completely unchangeable; you'd have to change the body to conform to the psyche.

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

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 belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.

On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.

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

If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.

I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.

The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.

There are physical characteristics which are inherited. These include things like good looks, high intelligence, physical coordination. These attributes contribute to success in life, and success in life is a determinant of optimism.

Optimistic people generally feel that good things will last a long time and will have a beneficial effect on everything they do. And they think that bad things are isolated: They won't last too long and won't affect other parts of life.

Positive emotion can be about the past, the present, or the future. The positive emotions about the future include optimism, hope, faith, and trust. Those about the present include joy, ecstasy, calm, zest, ebullience, pleasure, and (most importantly) flow; these emotions are what most people usually mean when they casually-but much too narrowly-talk about "happiness." The positive emotions about the past include satisfaction, contentment, fulfillment, pride, and serenity.

You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.

I don't think anyone's found a way of eliminating thoughts of danger and loss. It's rather that, when they're unrealistic, you become an acrobat at marshaling evidence against them.

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.

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.

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.

When the individual has a lot of money to spend. individualism becomes a powerful. and profitable, worldview.

Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.

I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, it is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them [I was a psychologist], they'd move away from me ... And now when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.

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.

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.

It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.

The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.

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

What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.

Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.

I believe it is within our capacity that by the year 2051 that 51 percent of the human population will be flourishing. That is my charge.

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.

I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.

The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a right of all Americans, as well as on the self-improvement shelves of every American bookstore. Yet the scientific evidence makes it seem unlikely that you can change your level of happiness in any sustainable way. It suggests that we each have a fixed range for happiness just as we do for weight. And just as dieters almost always regain the weight they lose, sad people don't become lastingly happy, and happy people don't become lastingly sad.

On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.

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.

It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me. Because, quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is, 'You want to know what's wrong with me.'

It's no surprise that optimistic athletes, managers and teams do better. What's interesting is where they do better. It's in coming back from defeat and acting in the clutch.

Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.

What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.

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.

I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease. But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral.

Reaching beyond where you are is really important.

When it comes to our health, there are essentially four things under our control: the decision not to smoke, a commitment to exercise, the quality of our diet, and our level of optimism. And optimism is at least as beneficial as the others.

Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical 'experience machine' that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain and give you any positive feelings you desire. Most people to whom I offer this imaginary choice refuse the machine. It is not just positive feelings we want: we want to be entitled to our positive feelings.

What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?

Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.

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

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.

I've been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I'm really not comfortable with the notion of present.

The goal of a life free of dysphoria is a snare and a delusion. A better goal is of good commerce with the world. Authentic happiness, astonishingly, can occur even in the presence of authentic sadness.

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.

Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.

The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.

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.