Learned Optimism Quotes

“While you can't control your experiences, you can control your explanations.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The genius of evolution lies in the dynamic tension between optimism and pessimism continually correcting each other.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“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.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good. This”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors. When”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“YOU SHOULD NOW be well on your way to using disputation, the prime technique for learned optimism, in your daily life. You first saw the ABC link—that specific beliefs lead to dejection and passivity. Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“people with pessimistic habits of thinking can transform mere setbacks into disasters. One way they do this is by converting their own innocence into guilt.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The theory clearly predicts that in the classroom and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the playing field, success will not necessarily go to the most talented. The prize will go to the adequately talented who are also optimists.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The optimists believe defeat is just a temporary setback.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“pessimism is a risk factor for depression in just the same sense as smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer or being a hostile, hard-driving man is a risk factor for heart attack.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“For example, if I promise you one thousand dollars to turn to this page, you will probably choose to do so, and you will succeed. If, however, I promise you one thousand dollars to contract the pupil of your eye, using only willpower, you may choose to do it, but that won’t matter. You are helpless to contract your pupil. Page turning is under your voluntary control; the muscles that change your pupillary size are not.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“The optimists believe defeat is just a temporary setback.”
― Seligman Martin, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“after seven years of experiments, it was clear to us that the remarkable attribute of resilience in the face of defeat need not remain a mystery. It was not an inborn trait; it could be acquired.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“With patients, he pushed and pushed until he had persuaded them to give up the irrational beliefs that sustained their depression. “What do you mean you can’t live without love?” he would cry. “Utter nonsense. Love comes rarely in life, and if you waste your life mooning over its all too ordinary absence, you are bringing on your own depression. You are living under a tyranny of should’s. Stop ‘should-ing’ on yourself!”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“They argued that these perpetrators have high self-esteem, and that their unwarranted self-esteem causes violence. Baumeister’s work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue. A sub-group of these children will also have a mean streak in them. When these children confront the real world, and it tells them they are not as great as they have been taught, they will lash out with violence. So it is possible that the twin epidemics among young people in the United States today, depression and violence, both come from this misbegotten concern: valuing how our young people feel about themselves more highly than how we value how well they are doing in the world.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Along with this escalation in material expectations has come an escalation in what counts as acceptable in work and in love. our job used to be counted satisfactory if it brought home the bacon. Not so today. It must also be meaningful. There must be room to move up. It must provide for a comfortable retirement. Coworkers must be congenial and the endeavor ecologically sound.

Marriage also now requires more than it used to. It's no longer just a matter of raising children. Our mate must be eternally sexy, and thin, and interesting to talk to, and good at tennis.. these inflated expectations are rooted in the expansion of choice.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“But failure also can occur when talent and desire are present in abundance but optimism is missing”
― Seligman Martin, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“Optimists recover from their momentary helplessness immediately. Very soon after failing, they pick themselves up, shrug, and start trying again.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“For optimists, defeat is a challenge, a mere setback on the road to inevitable victory.”
― Seligman Martin, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life