Top 15 Martin E P Seligman Quotes

While you can't control your experiences, you can control your explanations.

Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.

Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.

Pessimistic labels lead to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts to change.

The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.

Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.

Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.

The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.

Alcoholics are, in truth, failures, and their failure is a simple failure of will. They have made bad choices, and they continue to do so every day. By calling them victims of a disease, we magically shift the burden of the problem from choice and personal control, where it belongs, to an impersonal force — disease.

Above all, during the interval, change from “ego orientation” to “task orientation.” Think: “I know this seems like a personal insult, but it is not. It is a challenge to be overcome that calls on skills I have.

Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good.

I used to think that the topic of positive psychology was happiness, that the gold standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing. This theory, which I call well-being theory, is very different from authentic happiness theory, and the difference requires explanation.

The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors.

First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.

Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it — their job, for example, or their love life — is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others.