Martin Seligman Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“It's a matter of ABC: When we encounter ADVERSITY, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into BELIEFS. These beliefs may become so habitual we don't even realize we have them unless we stop to focus on them. And they don't just sit there idly; they have CONSEQUENCES.”

“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.”

“Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.”

“One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn't be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy - just not in the same moment that you're sad.”

“Optimism generates hope.
Hope releases dreams.
Dreams set goals.
Enthusiasm follows.”

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

“Pleasure is the least consequential. Engagement and meaning are much more important.”

“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.”

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

“Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. It's about education, work, marriage - it's even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.”

“Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage.”

“Reaching beyond where you are is really important.”

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

“Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The drive to resist compulsion is more important in wild animals than sex, food, or water. The drive for competence or to resist compulsion is a drive to avoid helplessness.”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“We're not prisoners of the past.”

“When an individual responds actively and constructively (as opposed to passively and destructively) to someone who is sharing a positive experience, love and friendship increase.”

“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.”

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