Quotes from Martin Seligman

In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.

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.

The word 'happiness' always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it's subjective.

The best therapists can do with sadness, anger, and anxiety is to help patients live in the more comfortable part of their set range.

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.

In human history, we are going from knowledge to omniscience, from potence to omnipotence, from ethics and religion to righteousness. So, in my view, God comes at the end of this long process. This may not happen in our lifetimes or even in the lifetime of our species.

Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.

The clearer the rules and the limits enforced by parents, the higher the child's self-esteem. The more freedom the child had, the lower his self-esteem.

The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.

On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.

[Psychology] should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage.

Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them [I was a psychologist], they'd move away from me. … And now when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.