To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.

I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.

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

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

Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.

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.

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.