Martin Seligman Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

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

Martin Seligman
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Seligman
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.

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

Martin Seligman
The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external.

Martin Seligman
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.

Martin Seligman
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.

Martin Seligman
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.

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

Martin Seligman
Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated.

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

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

Martin Seligman
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.

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

Martin Seligman
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

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

Martin Seligman
Depression is the common cold of psychopathology and has touched the lives of us all, yet it is probably the most dimly understood and most inadequately investigated of all the major forms of psychopathology..

Martin Seligman
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.

Martin Seligman
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.

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

Martin Seligman
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.

Martin Seligman
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.

Martin Seligman
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.

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

Martin Seligman