The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.
I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.
On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
Optimistic people generally feel that good things will last a long time and will have a beneficial effect on everything they do. And they think that bad things are isolated: They won't last too long and won't affect other parts of life.
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.
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.
The goal of a life free of dysphoria is a snare and a delusion. A better goal is of good commerce with the world. Authentic happiness, astonishingly, can occur even in the presence of authentic sadness.
If you were an optimistic teen, then you'll be an optimist at 80. People's reactions to bad events are highly stable over a half century or more.
There are physical characteristics which are inherited. These include things like good looks, high intelligence, physical coordination. These attributes contribute to success in life, and success in life is a determinant of optimism.
We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships.
Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology.
The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.
Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.
High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.
I believe it is within our capacity that by the year 2051 that 51 percent of the human population will be flourishing. That is my charge.
One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn't be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy - just not in the same moment that you're sad.
One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we've been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the 'I' gets bigger and bigger, and the 'we' gets smaller and smaller.
