Martin Seligman: It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to pe...

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

Martin Seligman

pessimist tragedy weather

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

Martin Seligman

increase kindness exercise

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

Martin Seligman

good-life signatures happiness

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.

Martin Seligman

psychology things-in-life quality

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

spiritual years thinking

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

deals optimism skills

Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage

Martin Seligman

psychology motivation inspiration

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

rewards littles mean

Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm follows

Martin Seligman

optimism goal dream

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

opposites believe thinking

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

good-life signatures meaningful

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

Martin Seligman

optimism achievement fighting

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

Martin Seligman

authenticity psychology virtue

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

good-relationship accomplishment feel-good

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

Martin Seligman

good-life life-is meaningful

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

finding-yourself psychology country

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

optimism belief meaningful

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

Martin Seligman

flow challenges way

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.

Martin Seligman

persistence skills children

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

exercise joy people

It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me. Because, quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is, 'You want to know what's wrong with me.'