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.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone.
Sick or well, blind or seeing, bond or free, we are here for a purpose and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good of life fills it . . . holy if only . . . we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded-the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcometh doubt.
Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.
To see the other side, to defend another people, not despite your tradition but because of it, is the heart of pluralism
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