Martin Seligman

Psychologist

1942-08-12

Quotes by Martin Seligman

• 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 do.

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• 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.

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• The goal of a life free of dysphoria is a snare and a delusion. A better goal is of good commerce with the world. Authentic happiness, astonishingly, can occur even in the presence of authentic sadness.

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• Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical 'experience machine' that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain and give you any positive feelings you desire. Most people to whom I offer this imaginary choice refuse the machine. It is not just positive feelings we want: we want to be entitled to our positive feelings.

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• Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else.

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

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• Sexual performance problems, such as impotence and frigidity, are 70 to 90 percent changeable. But a homosexual who wants to be a heterosexual - that's close to unchangeable. And a transsexual - say a man who believes he's really a woman in a man's body - is completely unchangeable; you'd have to change the body to conform to the psyche.

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• 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.

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• The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.

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• Well-being cannot exist just in your own head. Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.

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• Positive psychology is not remotely intended to replace therapy or pharmacology. So when depressed, anxious or in panic or post-traumatic stress disorder, I am all for therapies that will work. Positive psychology is another arrow in the quiver of public policy and psychology through which we can raise wellbeing above zero.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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