Christopher Peterson > Quotes

“Humble individuals will not willfully distort information in order to defend, repair, or verify their own image. For humble people, there should be no press toward self-importance and no burning need to see—or present—themselves as being better than they actually are. They should also not be particularly interested in dominating others in order to receive entitlements or to elevate their own status. On the other hand, humility should not lead people to take harsh or condemning approaches toward themselves, magnifying weaknesses and severely punishing failures while overlooking strengths and successes.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Appreciation of beauty is a strength that connects someone directly to excellence. Gratitude connects someone directly to goodness.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“In short, if one is entitled to everything, then one is thankful for nothing.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“We are reminded of the comment by Linus in the comic strip Peanuts: “I love humanity—it’s people I can’t stand.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Humility, rather than involving the presence of certain thoughts or behaviors, might better be construed as the absence of narcissism, self-enhancement, or defensiveness.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“This character strength is a quiet one. Those who are modest let their accomplishments speak for themselves. They do not seek the spotlight. They do not toot their own horns. They acknowledge mistakes and imperfections. They do not take undue credit for their accomplishments, instead regarding themselves as fortunate to be in a position where something good has happened to them.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“We are grateful to people who occasionally help out, but we elevate them to a higher moral plane when they consistently do so, when we can count on them to show up rain or shine, not just when the boss is looking or free coffee is being served ... Along these lines, we value people who are loyal to their groups, who do not jump ship at the first rough weather.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Indeed, lack of self-control may be at the root of all emotional disorders, so named because the person is controlled by anxiety and depression rather than vice versa. Everyone experiences negative emotions; what determines whether they escalate to full-blown disorders may simply be whether the person has the ability to circumscribe them.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Although acting inconsistently with one’s own implicit interests and developmental trends can sometimes pay off, the data suggest that those who ignore their deeper impulses, curiosities, and values typically experience sub-optimal outcomes. For example, the latter types tend not to be the ones who make a mark on history.”
― Christopher Peterson , Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“... gratefulness is an attitude that underlies successful functioning over the life course.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Attention is crucial to the success of self-regulation, and indeed attentional processes often constitute the first step toward either success or failure at self-regulation. As mentioned, reduced self-monitoring is often a precipitating factor in self-regulation failure because it is quite easy to lose track of one’s status or quit regulating oneself when one cannot evaluate the distance between the current state and the goal state ... When people cease to attend to their own behavior, self-regulation typically deteriorates.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“An aha experienced decades ago by one of us is relevant to this point. Halfway through a grueling clinical internship, CP [Christopher Peterson] complained to his supervisor, “No one [meaning the patients] ever says thank you for anything I try to do.” The response from the experienced psychiatrist stopped CP mid-whine: “If they [the patients] could say thank you, how many of them do you think would be in a psychiatric hospital?”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Youth development is an interdisciplinary field that draws broadly on different social sciences to understand children and adolescents (Larson, 2000). It embraces an explicit developmental stance: Children and adolescents are not miniature adults, and they need to be understood on their own terms. Youth development also emphasizes the multiple contexts in which development occurs. Particularly influential as an organizing framework has been Bronfenbrenner’s (1977, 1979, 1986) ecological approach, which articulates different contexts in terms of their immediacy to the behaving individual. So, the microsystem refers to ecologies with which the individual directly interacts: family, peers, school, and neighborhood. The mesosystem is Bronfenbrenner’s term for relationships between and among various microsystems. The exosystem is made up of larger ecologies that indirectly affect development and behavior, like the legal system, the social welfare system, and mass media. Finally, the macrosystem consists of broad ideological and institutional patterns that collectively define a culture. There is the risk of losing the individual amid all these systems, but the developmental perspective reminds us that different children are not interchangeable puppets. Each young person brings his or her own characteristics to life, and these interact with the different ecologies to produce behavior. Youth development”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“... intelligence is a combination of mental ability and the accumulated knowledge that arises from that ability.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Smith observed that society can function purely on utilitarian grounds or on the basis of gratitude, but he clearly believed that societies of gratitude were more attractive in large part because they provide an important emotional resource for promoting social stability.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Jaynes (1976) suggested that task persistence is a uniquely human strength. With some exceptions, most animals do not persist at any given task longer than 20 minutes before moving on to the next task.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Teamwork is a dance—engrossing to perform and exciting to watch.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“However, research with activists in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s and of those who sheltered Holocaust survivors during World War II confirm that compassion, empathy, and social responsibility were core family values that motivated their actions. Once exercised in action, values of social responsibility and service to others may become integral to identity.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Forgiveness and mercy are fulfilling for the individual, although not necessarily fun. Indeed, it is precisely when forgiveness is difficult and produces no immediate hedonic payoff that it is most fulfilling in the sense of allowing individuals to know they have done the right thing. Revenge can be very sweet, and grudges can have considerable staying power, but these are negative actions that often satisfy only deficiency motives—even when sated, they leave us empty. Turning the other cheek, loving our enemies, giving people a second chance, starting over—these satisfy us even if they effect no permanent change in the world in which we live. One need not be cynical to observe that forgiveness and mercy do not always prevent future transgressions against us. That is why a general trait needs to exist to handle the repeat business.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“It does appear that involvement in organizations with a diverse membership and in groups that engage in acts of charity or community service boosts social trust.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Bravery raises the moral and social conscience of a society.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Encouragement as a concept in psychology has been most influenced by Adler (1946), who proposed that discouragement was at the root of many mental health problems and the seed of destruction in many interpersonal relationships.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Starrett (1996) argued that, because we inhabit a global community, our civic responsibilities transcend the borders of nation-states.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Just as a muscle grows tired from exertion, the capacity for self-regulation becomes depleted after it is used. Also like a muscle, the capacity for self-regulation appears to grow stronger through regular exercise (after it recovers from the initial fatigue).”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Likewise, as William James maintained, the virtues of a good citizen—a sense of duty and responsibility to the common good—are the “rock upon which states are built”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“The ties that bind younger generations to the broader community are reciprocal, that is, when young people feel that the community cares about them and that they have a say in community affairs, they are more likely to identify with the community’s goals and to want to commit to its service. The evidence from prevention and community youth development studies is clear: When youths feel connected to others in the institutions of their communities, they are less likely to violate the norms and more likely to serve the common good of those communities.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“To be humble and modest does not entail self-derogation or self-humiliation.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“From C. R. Rogers’s (1961) perspective, the problems of inauthenticity arise not because a person hides his real emotional reactions from others (as may sometimes be appropriate) but because he hides them from himself.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“It is conceivable that the psychological and physical benefits of volunteering eventuate in longer life. Two recent studies found that among community-dwelling older adults, volunteering led to reduced risk of early death.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Fairness is not decomposable into other classified strengths, although such characteristics as kindness may lay its foundation and such characteristics as self-regulation may facilitate its implementation.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification