Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
All Quotes by author - 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. "
Believe
I Believe
Will
" If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago. "
Just
Positive
Emotions
" 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. "
Human
Face
Positive
" 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. "
Think
Positive
Good
" It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success. "
Keep Going
Talent
Face
" 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. "
Defeat
Better
Interesting
" 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. "
Learning
Day
Try
" 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. "
Moment
Sad
Angry
" 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. "
Victory
Love
Friendship
" 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. "
Life
Time
Think
" 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. "
People
Free
Goals
" 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. "
Depression
Character
Age
" 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. "
Thoughts
Good
Optimism
" 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. "
Sports
Work
Marriage
" Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves. "
People
Good
Giving
" Reaching beyond where you are is really important. "
Really
Beyond
You
" 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. "
Problems
Woman
You
" 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. "
Experience
Life
People
" 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. "
Exercise
Happiness
People
" 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. "
World
Sadness
Life
" 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. "
Life
Good
Happiness
" 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. "
Life
Looks
Good
" 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. "
Control
Good
Think
" 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. "
Meaning
Good
Feeling
" What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning. "
Just
Happiness
Justice
" When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day. "
Go
Time
Day
Check our other websites:
BookDark
MusicDark