Martin Seligman quotes - page 2

Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else. (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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.
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)
You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.
Martin Seligman
We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships.
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
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
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
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
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'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 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
Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm follows. (Martin Seligman)
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
Martin Seligman
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
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
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