People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.

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.

The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future.

You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.

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

So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose

If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.