Martin Seligman Quotes Page 2

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

“Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.”

“By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.”

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

“Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Both positive and negative ways of thinking are important in the right situation, but all too often schools emphasize critical thinking and following orders rather than creative thinking and learning new stuff.
The result is that children rank the appeal of going to school just slightly above going to the dentist. In the modern world, I believe we have finally arrived at an era in which more creative thinking, less rote following of orders—and yes, even more enjoyment — will succeed better.”

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

“I used to think that the topic of positive psychology was happiness, that the gold standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing. This theory, which I call well-being theory, is very different from authentic happiness theory, and the difference requires explanation.”

“It turns out, however, that how much life satisfaction people report is itself determined by how good we feel at the very moment we are asked the question. Averaged over many people, the mood you are in determines more than 70 percent of how much life satisfaction you report and how well you judge your life to be going at that moment determines less than 30 percent.”

“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.”

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

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

“After seven years of experiments, it was clear to us that the remarkable attribute of resilience in the face of defeat need not remain a mystery. It was not an inborn trait; it could be acquired.”

“Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.”

“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.”

“Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.”

“Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good.”

“Experiments also prove that optimists do better in school, at work, and in sports.”

“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.”