A Quote by Martin Seligman

Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.

Martin Seligman

Quote Topics

Art Causes Finding Helplessness Hope Limit Misfortune Original Situation Specific Temporary Time

Quote Author

Martin Seligman
American - Psychologist
Born: August 12, 1942

On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.

Martin Seligman

Pessimists see problems as stemming from stable and universal causes, thus making them less susceptible to corrective action. Optimists, in contrast, view problems as temporary and resulting from specific factors that will either change or be changed.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Of causes, some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence, when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as 'by complete and primary causes,' but 'by auxiliary and proximate causes.'

Chrysippus

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

Jane Jacobs

One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat.

Napoleon Hill

Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.

Martin Seligman

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.

Martin Seligman

There are no causes of poverty. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes coldit is the absence of energy. Similarly poverty is the absence of wealth. We should ask, ‘what are the causes of wealth?’

Madsen Pirie

...Force yourself to use the optimist's explanatory style: 'The situation is temporary. The effect will be limited, not pervasive. And it's due to external causes.' If you just can't make that work for you, refocus your attention...Turn your attention in a totally different direction for the time being. Replace the distressing thoughts with other ideas. Distract yourself.

Price Pritchett

If you're making enemies along the way, you're going to limit the ability for yourself to be successful in advancing your causes.

Steve Scalise

[I]n framing a Government for a nation we ought, in those provisions which are designed to be permanent, to calculate not on temporary, but on permanent causes of expence.

Alexander Hamilton

Guys are much happier when someone puts a limit on their behavior and causes them to make a real connection with another person.

Drew Pinsky

Medicine deals with the states of health and disease in the human body. It is a truism of philosophy that a complete knowledge of a thing can only be obtained by elucidating its causes and antecedents, provided, of course, such causes exist. In medicine it is, therefore, necessary that causes of both health and disease should be determined.

Avicenna

A physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes.

Bertrand Russell

Since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear ... there is absolutely no doubt that every affect in the universe can be explained satisfactorily from final causes, by the aid of the method of maxima and minima, as it can be from the effective causes themselves ... Of course, when the effective causes are too obscure, but the final causes are readily ascertained, the problem is commonly solved by the indirect method.