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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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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
Exercise
Produce
Single
Momentary
Wells
Reliable
Well
Tested
Produces
Kindness
Increase

More quotes by Martin Seligman

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Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them [I was a psychologist], they'd move away from me. ... And now when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.
Martin Seligman
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Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.
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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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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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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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 Seligman
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The Fundamentalist Religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
Martin Seligman
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Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm follows
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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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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Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style pervasiveness and permanence.
Martin Seligman
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Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
Martin Seligman
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Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.
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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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 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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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 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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Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
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