Martin Seligman Quotes

Well-being cannot exist just in your own head. Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.

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.

It's about enjoying your life. If you have no family, no friends to enjoy it with, it don't matter how much you have, how much success you have, how much fame you have, how much money you have, it doesn't matter.

The goal isn't to be successful; it's to be happy. And so it doesn't matter if I'm doing things in New York or teaching high school or I drop it altogether and sell coffee. The goal is to be happy, and people and relationships are what makes you happy.

Finding happiness is like finding yourself. You don't find happiness, you make happiness. You choose happiness. Self-actualization is a process of discovering who you are, who you want to be and paving the way to happiness by doing what brings you the most meaning and contentment to your life over the long run.

We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life and stop measuring our well-being simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our well-being.

Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.

People who have discovered a purpose feel better, like themselves more, age more subtly, and live longer.

When I look at my longterm goals for the rest of my life, there are so many things other than performing that make me happy.

Being happy is not all about love! Love is not everything. Work, friends, and achieving things... your finite thing in life can't be getting married and having children. Like, creating a life for myself that's my own, and my own road? That was always the most important thing for me. Right now, I have a kid and stuff, and it's fantastic to be a mother, but it's not the final thing. You want to stay an individual. You need to stay an individual for your kid, as an example of what a human being should be! You want to stay true to yourself and not become a half a person. That is so, so important.

The only thing that I am ambitious about is to live a good life. Full stop.

When you realise that money doesn't actually make you happy, it's a quick fix to have things you've always wanted, but then when you have it, you realise that's not what actually makes you happy. It's more about having a great marriage and happy children; that's what life's all about.

I was concerned about filling my life up with something important to me. To me, it was just necessary.

I would like my kids to follow their bliss.

It's weird. I don't really have goals. I just try to make sure I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Once I start to get sick of it, the next thing becomes obvious.

My ambition is to have beautiful encounters, not to make money.

I believe people should live full lives and not settle for anything less.

That should be the measure of success for everyone. It's not money, it's not fame, it's not celebrity; my index of success is happiness.

You've got to live your life, you've got to enjoy it.

I couldn't do anything I didn't enjoy.

When you don't have children you have to define and make your own purpose, and make your own reason for being here.

If you do the things you enjoy and are good at, I really have a feeling that that will lead to having a fulfilling life, and people with fulfilling lives are able to be 'good people.'

Some goals are not going to fulfill you. Choose goals that you value and care about.

I don't want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.

I care most about how people live their lives, what choices they make, and how they get the best from themselves.