Quotes from 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.

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.

Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.

The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.

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.

Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.

We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships.

High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.

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.

In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.

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.

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.

Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.

The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.

Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage

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.

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.'

The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.

I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness.

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.

Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology.

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.

When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.

What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.