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

Martin Seligman

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Martin Seligman
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: August 12
Bridge Player
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
Albany
New York
Martin E. P. Seligman
Martin E P Seligman
M. E. P. Seligman
M E P Seligman
M. Seligman
M Seligman
Seligman
Seligman M
Seligman M.
Seligman M. E. P.
Seligman MEP
Martin Elias Peter Seligman
Persons
Depressed
Person
Hopeful
Without
Depression
Nothing
Esteem
Bolstering
Self
Accomplish
Accomplishes
Always
Changing
Passivity
Active
Improves
Becomes
Hopelessness

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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.
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We're not prisoners of the past.
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What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?
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Money, amazingly, is losing its power... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.
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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.
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I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.
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The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.
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Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
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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.
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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.
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You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
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Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.
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Reaching beyond where you are is really important.
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The drive to resist compulsion is more important in wild animals than sex, food, or water... The drive for competence or to resist compulsion is a drive to avoid helplessness.
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People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
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Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage
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On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.
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Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
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The Fundamentalist Religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
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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.
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