Martin Seligman quotes - page 3

Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage. (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. View quote
Martin Seligman
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity. View quote
Martin Seligman
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way. View quote
Martin Seligman
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health. View quote
Martin Seligman
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life. View quote
Martin Seligman
Curing the negatives does not produce the positives. View quote
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. View quote
Martin Seligman
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. View quote
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. View quote
Martin Seligman
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. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Martin Seligman
Money, amazingly, is losing its power... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy. View quote
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. View quote
Martin Seligman
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? View quote
Martin Seligman
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. View quote
Martin Seligman
The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future. View quote
Martin Seligman
Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted. View quote
Martin Seligman
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. (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. View quote
Martin Seligman
By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue. View quote
Martin Seligman
The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external. View quote
Martin Seligman
Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them. View quote
Martin Seligman