We're not prisoners of the past.

I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.

Reaching beyond where you are is really important.

Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.

I don't mind being wrong, and I don't mind changing my mind.

Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.

Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems.

What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.

Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.

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

Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage

Optimism generates hope...hope releases dreams...dreams set goals...enthusiasm follows

Pleasure is the least consequential... engagement and meaning are much more important.

I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness.

I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.

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

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

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

We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships.

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

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

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

Perhaps the single most robust fact across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else.

Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.

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

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

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

It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.

Money, amazingly, is losing its power... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.

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

When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.

You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.

The Fundamentalist Religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.

Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.

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

High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.

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

What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.

The best therapists can do with sadness, anger, and anxiety is to help patients live in the more comfortable part of their set range.

I believe it is within our capacity that by the year 2051 that 51 percent of the human population will be flourishing. That is my charge.

The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.

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.

If you were an optimistic teen, then you'll be an optimist at 80. People's reactions to bad events are highly stable over a half century or more.

I'm trying to broaden the scope of positive psychology well beyond the smiley face. Happiness is just one-fifth of what human beings choose to do.

On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.

Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology.

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

One of my signature strengths is the love of learning, and by teaching, I have built it into the fabric of my life. I try to do some of it every day.

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

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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