Top 70 Martin E.P. Seligman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Giving Up Quotes

2. “The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

3. “The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

4. “Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. Its about education, work, marriage – its even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

5. “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.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

6. “Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

7. “You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

8. “Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

9. “When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

10. “Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

11. “Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

12. “Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

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

— Martin E.P. Seligman

14. “Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

15. “To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

16. “Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

17. “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 E.P. Seligman

18. “Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

19. “Reaching beyond where you are is really important.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

20. “There is one aspect of happiness that’s been well studied, and it’s the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

21. “If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

22. “Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.”

— Martin E.P. 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 E.P. Seligman

24. “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.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

25. “Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

26. “Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

27. “Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

Featured in: Depression Quotes

28. “Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

29. “We’re not prisoners of the past.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

30. “In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

31. “People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

32. “First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

33. “When it comes to our health, there are essentially four things under our control: the decision not to smoke, a commitment to exercise, the quality of our diet, and our level of optimism. And optimism is at least as beneficial as the others.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

34. “What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

35. “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.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

36. “In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

37. “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 opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy – just not in the same moment that you’re sad.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

38. “I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

39. “Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

40. “By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

41. “The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

42. “Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

43. “Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

44. “The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It’s internal rather than external.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

45. “The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

46. “Depression is now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960, and it strikes at a much younger age. The mean age of a person’s first episode of depression forty years ago was 29.5, while today it is 14.5 years. This is a paradox, since every objective indicator of well-being – purchasing power, amount of education, availability of music, and nutrition – has been going north, while every indicator of subjective well-being has been going south. How is this epidemic to be explained?”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

47. “Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

48. “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.”

— Martin E.P. Seligman

49. “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 E.P. Seligman

50. “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 E.P. Seligman