“It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.”
“It's no surprise that optimistic athletes, managers and teams do better. What's interesting is where they do better. It's in coming back from defeat and acting in the clutch.”
“P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements of what free people chose to do. Pretty much everything else is in service of one of or more of these goals. That's the human dashboard.”
“Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die.”
“High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.”
“One of my signature strengths is the love of learning, and by teaching, I have built it into the fabric of my life. I try to do some of it every day.”
“Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.”
“The best therapists can do with sadness, anger, and anxiety is to help patients live in the more comfortable part of their set range.”
“The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.”
“What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.”