Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.
Martin SeligmanIn your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.
Martin SeligmanLife inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.
Martin SeligmanPsychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage
Martin SeligmanThe defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that 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 that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.
Martin Seligman