Martin Seligman Quotes

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘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 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

‘I don’t mind being wrong, and I don’t mind changing my mind.’ – Martin Seligman

‘Reaching beyond where you are is really important.’ – 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