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

When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.

The 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.

Reaching beyond where you are is really important.

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.

Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.

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.