Martin Seligman quotes

Martin Seligman is an American psychologist, widely regarded as the founder of positive psychology. His research has focused on well-being, optimism, and resilience, transforming approaches to mental health. He has authored numerous influential books and continues to impact the field of psychology worldwide. Here are 83 of his quotes:

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

Reaching beyond where you are is really important.

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

We're not prisoners of the past.

Martin Seligman

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

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.

Martin Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.

Martin Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

Positive psychology is not remotely intended to replace therapy or pharmacology. So when depressed, anxious or in panic or post-traumatic stress disorder, I am all for therapies that will work. Positive psychology is another arrow in the quiver of public policy and psychology through which we can raise wellbeing above zero.

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

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

Martin Seligman