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.
Martin SeligmanRead
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.
Interpretation
Optimism in youth often translates into a lifelong positive outlook on life.
This quote from Martin Seligman emphasizes the idea that the way individuals respond to adversity is consistent over time. If a person cultivates an optimistic attitude during their teenage years, this outlook tends to persist, influencing their perspective even into old age. The stability of people's reactions to negative experiences underscores the importance of fostering a positive mindset early in life.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the power of positivity.
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.
One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we've been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the 'I' gets bigger and bigger, and the 'we' gets smaller and smaller.
The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.
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.
I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease. But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.
I believe every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. Violence should not be answered just by greater violence but by real understanding. We must ask: 'Where is the violence coming from? What is its meaning?
may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong.
There are some who maintain that trade will regulate itself, and it is not to be benefited by the encouragements or restraints of government. Such persons will imagine that there is no need of a common directing power. This is one of those wild speculative paradoxes, which have grown into credit among us, contrary to the uniform practice and sense of the most enlightened nations.
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