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We're not prisoners of the past.

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
Prisoners
Prisoner
Past

More quotes by Martin Seligman

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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
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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 Seligman
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You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
Martin Seligman
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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.
Martin Seligman
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Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
Martin Seligman
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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.
Martin Seligman
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When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
Martin Seligman
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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. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and if God comes at the end, such a life is sacred.
Martin Seligman
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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.
Martin Seligman
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Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
Martin Seligman
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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.
Martin Seligman
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By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.
Martin Seligman
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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 Seligman
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Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm follows
Martin Seligman
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Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style pervasiveness and permanence.
Martin Seligman
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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 Seligman
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What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?
Martin Seligman
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Money, amazingly, is losing its power... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.
Martin Seligman
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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.
Martin Seligman
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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.
Martin Seligman