Seligman Quotes & Sayings

The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external. — Martin Seligman

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

Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people. — 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

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

The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future. — Martin Seligman

When our grandparents failed, they had comfortable spiritual furniture to rest in. They had, for the most part, their relationship to God, their relationship to a nation they loved, their relationship to a community and a large extended family. Faith in God, community, nation, and the large extended family have all eroded in the last forty years, and the spiritual furniture that we used to sit in has become threadbare. — Martin E.P. 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

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

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

Pessimistic labels lead to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts to change. — Martin E.P. Seligman

Alcoholics are, in truth, failures, and their failure is a simple failure of will. They have made bad choices, and they continue to do so every day. By calling them victims of a disease, we magically shift the burden of the problem from choice and personal control, where it belongs, to an impersonal force - disease. — Martin E.P. Seligman

There is no way to imagine what it feels like to be shot at. I will never be with him when he is the most scared. — Melissa 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

Afghanistan changed him, but Iraq sculpted him. — Melissa Seligman

Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves. — 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

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

Net result [of the Dept. of Agriculture's Payment in Kind - PIK - program]: total farm income, now expected to be around $25 billion, this fiscal year, will exceed total federal subsidies by only a couple of billion. You could argue that those fellows out there on the fruited plain are in effect working for the federal government and that, therefore, the U.S. now has socialized agriculture under the Reagan Administration. Rich, eh? — Daniel 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

What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five? — Martin Seligman

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

A raise is like a martini: it elevates the spirit, but only temporarily. — Daniel 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

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

So, now, in this new situation, they didn't try jumping to the safe half of the box because they believed there was nothing they could do to avoid the shock. Just like the workers at the Johannesburg construction company, they essentially figured, "why bother?" After decades of studying human behavior, Seligman and his colleagues found that the same patterns of helplessness that he saw in those dogs are incredibly common in humans. When we fail, or when life delivers us a shock, we can become so hopeless that we respond by simply giving up. — Shawn Achor

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

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

We're not prisoners of the past. — 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

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

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

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

By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue. — Martin Seligman

We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships. — Martin Seligman

We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events. After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P's can stunt recovery: (1) personalization - the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness - the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence - the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever. The three P's play like the flip side of the pop song "Everything Is Awesome" - "everything is awful." The loop in your head repeats, "It's my fault this is awful. My whole life is awful. And it's always going to be awful." Hundreds — Sheryl Sandberg

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better. — Martin Seligman

The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other. — Martin E.P. Seligman

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

Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else. — Martin Seligman

Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair ... — 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

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

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

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

Exploders, people who have frequent outbursts of temper, also have more cancer than normal people. — Martin E.P. 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

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

Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others. — Martin E.P. 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

Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts. — Martin E.P. Seligman

You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way. — 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

Years later, when I got to college, I learned about an important theory of psychology called Learned Helplessness, developed by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman. This theory, backed up by years of research, is that a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment. — Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

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

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

Practiced regularly (twice a day), relaxation or meditation prevents angry arousal. — Martin E.P. Seligman

Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence. — Martin E.P. Seligman

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

First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst. — Martin E.P. 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

Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts. — Martin E.P. 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

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

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

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

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

The genius of Peterson and Seligman's classification is to get the conversation going, to propose a specific list of strengths and virtues, and then let the scientific and therapeutic communities work out the details. Just as the DSM is thoroughly revised every ten or fifteen years, the classification of strengths and virtues (known among positive psychologists as the "un-DSM") is sure to be revised and improved in a few years. In daring to be specific, in daring to be wrong, Peterson and Seligman have demonstrated ingenuity, leadership, and hope. — Jonathan Haidt

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

The meeting [in San Antonio of the National Women's Political Caucus] featured a cattle show at which a herd of Democratic candidates- Glenn, Cranston, Mondale, Hart, and Hollings- pantingly pantomined their fidelity to feminism, stopping just short of a pledge to use nuclear weapons against any states that omit to ratify the Equal Right Amendment. — Daniel Seligman