Martin Seligman Quotes

If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence.

Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.

It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.

Living a good life leads to enduring happiness. Goodness in and of itself is the practice AND the reward.

The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.

Happiness is a man's greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.

Happiness is living by inner purpose.

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

I think that's one of the things that's missing in a lot of people's lives. That's finding out what works for you and doing that.

It is not possible to sin enough to be happy. It isn't possible to buy enough to be happy, or to entertain or indulge or pamper ourselves enough to be happy. It is not possible to hide enough or run far enough away from trials and troubles to be happy. Happiness and joy come only when we are living up to who we are... I have never met anyone who was happier because he was immoral, or because he was addicted to something, or because he was dishonest and compromised his integrity.

Happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential.

A true barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of the day.

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.

Many people know what they want to have, but have no idea of who they want to be. Getting 'things' simply will not fulfill you. Only living and doing what you believe is 'the right thing' will give you that sense of inner strength that we all deserve.

So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose

Make us happy and you make us good.

...happiness is an activity and a complete utilization of virtue, not conditionally but absolutely.

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

You will find true success and happiness if you have only one goal, there really is only one, and that is this: to fulfill the highest most truthful expression of yourself as a human being. You want to max out your humanity by using your energy to lift yourself up, your family and the people around you. Theologian Howard Thurman said it best. He said, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.

It is worthwhile for one to make an effort to achieve happiness. Just as the purpose of a plant is to grow, so it is that the main purpose of every human being is to survive and to grow until death.

Life finds its purpose and fulfillment in the expansion of happiness.

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself, 'What makes me come alive?' Because what the world - a wife, a child - needs is men who have come alive.

The last part, the part you're now approaching, was for Aristotle the most important for happiness.

Success is always something completely different to people. I feel like I've succeeded, if I'm doing something that makes me happy and I'm not lying to anybody.