Martin E.p. Seligman Quotes

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

Martin Seligman

#2. While you can't control your experiences, you can control your explanations.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#3. What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?

Martin Seligman

#4. Pleasure is the least consequential ... engagement and meaning are much more important.

Martin Seligman

#5. 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

#6. The best therapists can do with sadness, anger, and anxiety is to help patients live in the more comfortable part of their set range.

Martin Seligman

#7. At my parents' house, I recently found a 1950 black-and-white snapshot of a chubby bespectacled warrior holding a three-and-a-half-foot freshly killed rattlesnake. The boy's smile is ecstatic.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#8. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.

Martin Seligman

#9. 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.

Martin Seligman

#10. 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

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

Martin Seligman

#12. 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.

Martin Seligman

#13. 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.

Martin Seligman

#14. 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.

Martin Seligman

#15. 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.

Martin Seligman

#16. 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.'

Martin Seligman

#17. What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.

Martin Seligman

#18. Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:

Martin E.P. Seligman

#19. Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#20. But out-of-hand anger ruins many lives. More, I believe, than schizophrenia, more than alcohol, more than AIDS. Maybe even more than depression.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#21. Exploders, people who have frequent outbursts of temper, also have more cancer than normal people.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#22. The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors. When

Martin E.P. Seligman

#23. [R]aising children ... was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#24. Try to reframe the provocation: Maybe he's having a rough day. There's no need to take it personally. Don't act like a jerk just because he is. He couldn't help it. This could be a testy situation, but easy does it.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#25. The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#26. Pessimistic labels lead to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts to change.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#27. Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#28. The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.

Martin Seligman

#29. Anger, unlike fear or sadness, is a moral emotion. It is "righteous." It aims not only to end the current trespass but to repair any damage done. It also aims to prevent further trespass by disarming, imprisoning, emasculating, or killing the trespasser.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#30. The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.

Martin E.P. Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

#32. Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.

Martin Seligman

#33. 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?

Martin Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

#35. So anger helps us defend threatened territory - it is just, and it is honest. Not only that - it is healthy. It is widely believed that bottling up anger can kill us, slowly and in three different ways.

Martin E.P. Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

#37. First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#38. Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.

Martin Seligman

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. Practiced regularly (twice a day), relaxation or meditation prevents angry arousal.

Martin E.P. Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.

Martin Seligman

#51. Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.

Martin Seligman

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. Money, amazingly, is losing its power ... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.

Martin Seligman

#56. Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage

Martin Seligman

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

Martin Seligman

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#62. High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.

Martin Seligman

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.

Martin Seligman

#66. Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems.

Martin Seligman

#67. The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.

Martin Seligman

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.

Martin Seligman