I'm trying to broaden the scope of positive psychology well beyond the smiley face. Happiness is just one-fifth of what human beings… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future. — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
Positive emotion can be about the past, the present, or the future. The positive emotions about the future include optimism, hope, faith,… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
Positive thinking is the notion that if you think good thoughts, things will work out well. Optimism is the feeling of thinking… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical 'experience machine' that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain… — 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
Positive psychology is not remotely intended to replace therapy or pharmacology. So when depressed, anxious or in panic or post-traumatic stress disorder,… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness. — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
I'm all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago. — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced… — Martin Seligman Copy Share Image
You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side. — 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