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
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
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
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
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
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
High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks. – 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
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 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
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
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
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
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
I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness. – Martin 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
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
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
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 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