Words matter. These are the best Martin Seligman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
I don’t mind being wrong, and I don’t mind changing my mind.
I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease. But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral.
I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.
One of my signature strengths is the love of learning, and by teaching, I have built it into the fabric of my life. I try to do some of it every day.
High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.
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.’
Reaching beyond where you are is really important.
If the point of the inner-child movement is to cure adult problems, it doesn’t work. Reliving childhood traumas gives you a nice afterglow, but it lasts only for hours or days. There is no evidence it changes adult problems.
Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology.
I believe it is within our capacity that by the year 2051 that 51 percent of the human population will be flourishing. That is my charge.
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.
It’s no surprise that optimistic athletes, managers and teams do better. What’s interesting is where they do better. It’s in coming back from defeat and acting in the clutch.
You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.
The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.
It’s my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.
I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness.
On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.
I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.
I don’t think anyone’s found a way of eliminating thoughts of danger and loss. It’s rather that, when they’re unrealistic, you become an acrobat at marshaling evidence against them.
When we take time to notice the things that go right – it means we’re getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.
The best therapists can do with sadness, anger, and anxiety is to help patients live in the more comfortable part of their set range.
One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we’ve been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the ‘I’ gets bigger and bigger, and the ‘we’ gets smaller and smaller.
If you were an optimistic teen, then you’ll be an optimist at 80. People’s reactions to bad events are highly stable over a half century or more.
Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else.
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.
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.
P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements of what free people chose to do. Pretty much everything else is in service of one of or more of these goals. That’s the human dashboard.
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.
Optimistic people generally feel that good things will last a long time and will have a beneficial effect on everything they do. And they think that bad things are isolated: They won’t last too long and won’t affect other parts of life.
