Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.
Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.
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.
Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage.
The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
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.
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
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.
Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.
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.
When we take time to notice the things that go right – it means we’re getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.
Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think.
People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated.
In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.