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" Reaching beyond where you are is really important. "

Martin Seligman

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" 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

" 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

" If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Martin Seligman

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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