What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character. — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues:… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me.… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation.… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
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… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
It's a matter of ABC: When we encounter ADVERSITY, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into BELIEFS. These beliefs may… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
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… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success. — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. It's about education, work, marriage - it's even about sports. What I want… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning. — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
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… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair... — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
We deprive our children, our charges, of persistence. What I am trying to say is that we need to fail, children need to fail,… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we've been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the 'I'… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
