Top 38 M Seligman Quotes
#1. High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.
Martin Seligman
#2. 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
#3. 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.
Martin Seligman
#4. 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
#5. It's a matter of ABC: When we encounter ADVERSITY, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into BELIEFS. These beliefs may become so habitual we don't even realize we have them unless we stop to focus on them. And they don't just sit there idly; they have CONSEQUENCES.
Martin Seligman
#6. The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
Martin Seligman
#7. Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems.
Martin Seligman
#8. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.
Martin Seligman
#9. Money, amazingly, is losing its power ... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.
Martin Seligman
#10. 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
#11. You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.
Martin Seligman
#12. Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.
Martin E.P. Seligman
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Above all, during the interval, change from "ego orientation" to "task orientation." Think: "I know this seems like a personal insult, but it is not. It is a challenge to be overcome that calls on skills I have.
Martin E.P. Seligman
#16. I've been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I'm really not comfortable with the notion of present.
Martin Seligman
#17. As he moves through his day, sometimes he stops and just stares at me. There is something on the tip of his tongue. But he doesn't say it. I'm not sure he knows what it is.
Melissa Seligman
#18. 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
#20. First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.
Martin E.P. Seligman
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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.
Martin Seligman
#24. Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
Martin Seligman
#25. Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.
Martin Seligman
#26. I hate myself that I wasn't there for him. I hate that I could not feel it in him. How could I not know what had happened? How could I not hear it in his voice, his comments, or in his demeanor? He needed my help, and I couldn't feel it.
Melissa Seligman
#27. 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.
Martin Seligman
#28. 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
#29. At last, psychology gets serious about glee, fun, and happiness. Martin Seligman has given us a gift-a practical map for the perennial quest for a flourishing life.
Daniel Goleman
#30. 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.
Martin Seligman
#31. Practiced regularly (twice a day), relaxation or meditation prevents angry arousal.
Martin E.P. Seligman
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.
Martin Seligman
#35. The word 'happiness' always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it's subjective.
Martin Seligman
#36. 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
#37. Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.
Martin E.P. Seligman
#38. When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
Martin Seligman
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