Martin Seligman Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Martin Seligman.
Famous Quotes By Martin Seligman
The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external. — Martin Seligman
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
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
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
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification. — Martin Seligman
I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks. — Martin Seligman
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity. — Martin Seligman
The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future. — Martin Seligman
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
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
Positive psychology is not remotely intended to replace therapy or pharmacology. So when depressed, anxious or in panic or post-traumatic stress disorder, I am all for therapies that will work. Positive psychology is another arrow in the quiver of public policy and psychology through which we can raise wellbeing above zero. — Martin Seligman
Pleasure is the least consequential ... engagement and meaning are much more important. — Martin Seligman
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
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
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
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
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. — Martin Seligman
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
I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize. — Martin Seligman
Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing. — Martin Seligman
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
Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better. — Martin Seligman
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
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. — Martin Seligman
What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character. — Martin Seligman
We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships. — Martin Seligman
Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems. — Martin Seligman
By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
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
Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else. — Martin Seligman
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
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. — Martin Seligman
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
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
Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted. — Martin Seligman
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life. — Martin Seligman
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
Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them. — Martin Seligman
Curing the negatives does not produce the positives. — Martin Seligman
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
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. — Martin Seligman
It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success. — Martin Seligman
I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process. — Martin Seligman
I have spent most of my life working with mental illness. I have been president of the world's largest association of mental-illness workers, and I am all for more funding for mental-health care and research - but not in the vain hope that it will curb violence. — Martin Seligman
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health. — Martin Seligman
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
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
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
Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical 'experience machine' that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain and give you any positive feelings you desire. Most people to whom I offer this imaginary choice refuse the machine. It is not just positive feelings we want: we want to be entitled to our positive feelings. — Martin Seligman
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
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. — Martin Seligman
I don't mind being wrong, and I don't mind changing my mind. — Martin Seligman
On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. — 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. — Martin Seligman
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
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
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
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
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
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. — Martin Seligman
The goal of a life free of dysphoria is a snare and a delusion. A better goal is of good commerce with the world. Authentic happiness, astonishingly, can occur even in the presence of authentic sadness. — Martin Seligman
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
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. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage — Martin Seligman
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
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
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. — Martin Seligman
You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side. — Martin Seligman
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
I'm all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn't take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
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. — Martin Seligman
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 permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair ... — Martin Seligman
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
What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five? — Martin Seligman
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
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
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves. — Martin Seligman
Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die. — Martin Seligman
We're not prisoners of the past. — Martin Seligman
In human history, we are going from knowledge to omniscience, from potence to omnipotence, from ethics and religion to righteousness. So, in my view, God comes at the end of this long process. This may not happen in our lifetimes or even in the lifetime of our species. — Martin Seligman
The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones. — Martin Seligman
Reaching beyond where you are is really important. — Martin Seligman
Money, amazingly, is losing its power ... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy. — Martin Seligman
There is an interesting scientific dispute about realism and optimism. 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. — Martin Seligman
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
Sexual performance problems, such as impotence and frigidity, are 70 to 90 percent changeable. But a homosexual who wants to be a heterosexual - that's close to unchangeable. And a transsexual - say a man who believes he's really a woman in a man's body - is completely unchangeable; you'd have to change the body to conform to the psyche. — Martin Seligman
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning. — Martin Seligman
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