1. “Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.”
2. “When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbue with authenticity.”
3. “Life inflicts same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.”
4. “We’re not prisoners of the past.”
5. “You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.”
6. “Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.”
7. “Reaching beyond where you are is really important.”
8. “Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimesions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.”
9. “Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.”
10. “People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.”
11. “A pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues te positive emotions about present, past and future.”
12. “Positive, optimistic sale people sell more than pessimistic sales people.”
13. “What determines how time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.”
14. “I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.”
15. “If we wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.”
16. “While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations.”
17. “Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both.”
18. “Pessimistic labels leads to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts the change.”
19. “The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.”
20. “Authentic happiness derives from raising bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.”
21. “The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.”
22. “The optimist believe defeat is just a temporary setback.”
23. “The takeaway lesson from positive psychology is that positive mental health is not just the absence of mental illness.”
24. “Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems.”
25. “I don’t mind being wrong and I don’t mind changing my mind.”
26. “What humans want is not just happiness. The want justice; they want meaning.”
27. “I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness.”
28. “Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression and as we age, to the gnawing realizaion that we are fidgeting until we die.”
29. “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.”
30. “Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.”
