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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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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.
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Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
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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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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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Reaching beyond where you are is really important.
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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.
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.
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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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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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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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On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.
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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Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage
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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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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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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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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 Seligman
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I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.
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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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