What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.

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 aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.

Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.

Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think.

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.

Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage

When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.

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

Well-being cannot exist just in your own head. Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.

The pain we feel in separation is the price we pay for love.

Most are inclined to recline into a reclining position, in order to enjoy the decline.

The same spiritual fulfillment that people find in religion can be found in science by coming to know, if you will, the mind of God.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel.

Well, he's just the same guy who in other aspects of his life would be very late to a trend.

A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.

For punches I never really choose, I take whatever opportunity is given to me. If it's a left, I'll take it. If it's a right I'll take it.

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.

Sometimes I claim I write because I put in an application at Sears and they've never called back.

I believe in good, having morals, be a decent person.