When it comes to our health, there are essentially four things under our control: the decision not to smoke, a commitment to exercise, the quality of our diet, and our level of optimism. And optimism is at least as beneficial as the others.
We’re not prisoners of the past.
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
Reaching beyond where you are is really important.
The clearer the rules and the limits enforced by parents, the higher the child’s self-esteem. The more freedom the child had, the lower his self-esteem.
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.
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.
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.
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.
Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.
What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?
Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.
Positive thinking is the notion that if you think good thoughts, things will work out well. Optimism is the feeling of thinking things will be well and be hopeful.
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.
Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.
Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.
The Fundamentalist Religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.