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.

Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.

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

The Fundamentalist Religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.

Positive emotion can be about the past, the present, or the future. The positive emotions about the future include optimism, hope, faith, and trust. Those about the present include joy, ecstasy, calm, zest, ebullience, pleasure, and (most importantly) flow; these emotions are what most people usually mean when they casually-but much too narrowly-talk about "happiness." The positive emotions about the past include satisfaction, contentment, fulfillment, pride, and serenity.

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.

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.