Martin Seligman

Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.

I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.

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.

Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair... The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.

The goal of positive psychology in well-being theory... is to increase the amount of *flourishing* in your own life and on the planet.

The entire thrust of this book is that optimal performance is tied to good well-being; the higher the positive morale, the better the performance.

Is there someone in your life whom you would feel comfortable phoning at four in the morning to tell your troubles to? If your answer is yes, you will likely live longer than someone whose answer is no.

We scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested... Here is the exercise: find one wholly unexpected kind thing to do tomorrow and just do it. Notice what happens to your mood.

Self-discipline outpredicts IQ for academic success by a factor of 2.

In the nineteenth century, politics, morality, and psychology were all about character.

As Nietzsche tells us, good philosophy always says, “Change your life!”

We estimate that being in the upper quartile of optimism seems to have a beneficial effect on cardiovascular risk roughly equivalent to not smoking two packs of cigarettes daily.

But what is wealth for, anyway? The goal of wealth, in my view, is not just to produce more wealth but to engender flourishing.

By some estimates, depression is about ten times more common now than it was fifty years ago.

People who make permanent and universal explanations for their troubles tend to collapse under pressure, both for a long time and across situations.

On a mechanical level, cognitive therapy works because it changes explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic, and the change is permanent. It gives you a set of cognitive skills for talking to yourself when you fail.

Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on.

The well-being that using your signature strengths engenders is anchored in authenticity.

My most basic concern, however, is measuring happiness’s constituents—the positive emotions and strengths—and then telling you what science has discovered about how you can increase them.

Positive Psychology points the way toward a secular approach to noble purpose and transcendent meaning— and, even more astonishingly, toward a God who is not supernatural.