#OPTIMISM QUOTES HOW TO#

People who resist helplessness believe the causes of bad events are temporary.” (44) “People who give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent: The bad events will persist, will always be there to affect their lives. “Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.” (15) But failure also can occur when talent and desire are present in abundance but optimism is missing.” (13) “When failure occurs, it is because either talent or desire is missing. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.” (8) Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.” (7) I am also convinced that if we are in the grip of this view, we will get depressed easily, we will accomplish less than our potential, and we will even get physically sick more often. “Twenty-five years of study has convinced me that if we habitually believe, as does the pessimist, that misfortune is our fault, is enduring, and will undermine everything we do, more of it will befall us than if we believe otherwise. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.” (5) The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case.

The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. “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. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.” (vi) “In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. For the “Meaningful Life,” you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.” (iv)

For the “Engaged Life,” you identify your highest strengths and talents and recraft your life to use them as much as you can in work, love, friendship, parenting, and leisure. For the “Pleasant Life,” you aim to have as much positive emotion as possible and learn the skills to amplify positive emotion. “”Happiness” is a scientifically unwieldy notion, but there are three different forms of it you can pursue. The skills fo becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.” (iv) “Women, in fact, being more emotionally labile, are both happier and sadder than men. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here. Below are the quotes I found most interesting.

#OPTIMISM QUOTES HOW TO#

I recently finished reading Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin Seligman.

Optimism quotes