Quotes from Martin Seligman

You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Money, amazingly, is losing its power... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.

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.

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.

Reaching beyond where you are is really important.

Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.

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.

Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.

By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.

Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.

People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.

Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.

There is one aspect of happiness that's been well studied, and it's the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?

Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm follows

Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.

Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems.

Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else.

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.

Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.

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.