Albert Ellis
People could rationally decide that prolonged relationships take up too much time and effort and that they'd much rather do other kinds of things. But most people are afraid of rejection.Collection: Dating
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.Collection: Life
The art of love is largely the art of persistence.Collection: Love
I hope to die in the saddle seat.Collection: Death
There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.Collection: Women
There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.Collection: Brainy
Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition.
Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human.
By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.
I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.
Let's suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.
Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.
For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.
We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn't love them back. They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression.
If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic.
I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.
I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it.
Many psychoanalysts refused to let me speak at their meetings. They were exceptionally vigorous because I had previously been an analyst and they were very angry at my flying the coop.
I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young women in public.
As a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.
In the old days we used to get more referrals, because people had insurance that paid for therapy. Now they belong to HMOs, and we can only be affiliated with a few HMOs.
I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.
I'm very happy. I like my work and the various aspects of it - going around the world, teaching the gospel according to St. Albert.
If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.
I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency.
People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.
Most people would have given up when faced with all the criticism I've received over the years.
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.Collection: Real
People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.Collection: Inspirational
You have considerable power to construct self-helping thoughts, feelings and actions as well as to construct self-defeating behaviors. You have the ability, if you use it, to choose healthy instead of unhealthy thinking, feeling and acting.Collection: Thinking
You mainly feel the way you think.Collection: Thinking
Strong feelings are fine; it's the overreactions that mess us up.Collection: Strong
Convince yourself that worrying about many situations will make them worse rather than improve them.Collection: Worry
The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better. But you don't get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.Collection: Wise
By honestly acknowledging your past errors, but never damning yourself for them, you can learn to use your past for your own future benefit.Collection: Failure
In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.Collection: Thinking
If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.Collection: Thinking
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own.Collection: Happiness
If you would stop, really stop, damning yourself, others, and unkind conditions, you would find it almost impossible to upset yourself emotionally - about anything. Yes, anything.Collection: Hate
When I started to get disillusioned with psychoanalysis I reread philosophy and was reminded of the constructivist notion that Epictetus had proposed 2,000 years ago: "People are disturbed not by events that happen to them, but by their view of them." I could see how that applied to many of my clients.Collection: Philosophy
If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them.Collection: People
The great majority of the things we now make ourselves panicked about are self-created 'dangers' that exist almost entirely in our own imaginations.Collection: Self
You never truly need what you want. That is the main and thoroughgoing key to serenity.Collection: Acceptance
Worrying about dying will hardly help you live.Collection: Worry