Martin Seligman
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.
Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.Collection: 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.Collection: Things In Life
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.Collection: Kindness
Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm followsCollection: Dream
Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.Collection: Weather
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.Collection: Skills
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.Collection: Spiritual
Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damageCollection: Motivation
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.Collection: Meaningful
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.Collection: Fighting
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.Collection: Psychology
Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.Collection: Doe
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.Collection: Challenges
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.Collection: 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 purposeCollection: Country
We're not prisoners of the past.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Meaningful
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.Collection: Depression
People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.Collection: Believe
Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. Its about education, work, marriage - its even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.Collection: Sports
Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them [I was a psychologist], they'd move away from me. ... And now when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.Collection: Motivation
The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external.Collection: Optimistic
Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.Collection: Hope
To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, It is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.Collection: Running
What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.Collection: Children
Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.Collection: Hope
Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.Collection: Optimistic
Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.Collection: Practice
The drive to resist compulsion is more important in wild animals than sex, food, or water... The drive for competence or to resist compulsion is a drive to avoid helplessness.Collection: Sex
On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.Collection: Future
I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Justice
In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Believe
Money, amazingly, is losing its power... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.Collection: Satisfaction
Positive emotion can be about the past, the present, or the future. The positive emotions about the future include optimism, hope, faith, and trust. Those about the present include joy, ecstasy, calm, zest, ebullience, pleasure, and (most importantly) flow; these emotions are what most people usually mean when they casually-but much too narrowly-talk about "happiness." The positive emotions about the past include satisfaction, contentment, fulfillment, pride, and serenity.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Adversity
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.Collection: Giving Up
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?Collection: Home
Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Commitment
The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a right of all Americans, as well as on the self-improvement shelves of every American bookstore. Yet the scientific evidence makes it seem unlikely that you can change your level of happiness in any sustainable way. It suggests that we each have a fixed range for happiness just as we do for weight. And just as dieters almost always regain the weight they lose, sad people don't become lastingly happy, and happy people don't become lastingly sad.Collection: Pursuit Of Happiness
By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.Collection: Creative
The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.Collection: Past