Martin Seligman Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Martin Seligman Quotes. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!

1
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.
Martin Seligman
2
High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.
Martin Seligman
3
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.
Martin Seligman
4
I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn’t very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.
Martin Seligman
5
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.
Martin Seligman
6
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.
Martin Seligman
7
I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness.
Martin Seligman
8
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.’
Martin Seligman
9
There are physical characteristics which are inherited. These include things like good looks, high intelligence, physical coordination. These attributes contribute to success in life, and success in life is a determinant of optimism.
Martin Seligman
10
It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.
Martin Seligman
11
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.
Martin Seligman
12
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.
Martin Seligman
13
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’ gets bigger and bigger, and the ‘we’ gets smaller and smaller.
Martin Seligman
14
I don’t mind being wrong, and I don’t mind changing my mind.
Martin Seligman
15
I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.
Martin Seligman
16
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.
Martin Seligman
17
I don’t think anyone’s found a way of eliminating thoughts of danger and loss. It’s rather that, when they’re unrealistic, you become an acrobat at marshaling evidence against them.
Martin Seligman
18
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.
Martin Seligman
19
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 I am all for more funding for mental-health care and research – but not in the vain hope that it will curb violence.
Martin Seligman
20
Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems.
Martin Seligman
21
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.
Martin Seligman
22
The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
Martin Seligman
23
Positive thinking is the notion that if you think good thoughts, things will work out well. Optimism is the feeling of thinking things will be well and be hopeful.
Martin Seligman
24
You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.
Martin Seligman
25
I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease. But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral.
Martin Seligman
26
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.
Martin Seligman
27
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
Martin Seligman
28
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.
Martin Seligman
29
When we take time to notice the things that go right – it means we’re getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.
Martin Seligman
30
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.
Martin Seligman