Martin Seligman Quotes

All things do help the unhappy man to fall.

Maybe it would have been better if neither of us had been born.

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead

I don't think we can be entirely happy seeing such misery around us.

Some people are so fond of ill luck that they run halfway to meet it.

Companions, in misery and worse, that is what we all are, and to try to change this substantially avails us nothing.

I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.

There are so many unpleasant things in the world already that there is no use in imagining any more.

Life is painful, nasty and short... in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

We are truly to be pitied.

It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.

You see misery, you see misfortune, you see pain, you see suffering. It's all part of the fatalistic way of looking at life.

To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling.

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

Everywhere I looked life seemed to be full of problems and they were just going to go on and on. It was never going to get any better.

I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.

Futility has become a great subject, full of opportunities.

The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.

You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

It's a good thing god doesn't let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself.

Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend, But to procrastinate his liveless end.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

We didn't wish -- wishes are wasted... We didn't hope -- because our future was inevitable... And we didn't pray -- we were on our own.