Albert Ellis Quotes

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.

People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.

There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.

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.

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.

You mainly feel the way you think.

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own.

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.

By honestly acknowledging your past errors, but never damning yourself for them, you can learn to use your past for your own future benefit.

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.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

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.

Stop shoulding on yourself

Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.

It is only in your mind that you have to excel, at anything or everything. Of course, it would be very nice to excel at most things. Indeed, we recommend that you try and do your best. But realistically, you are entitled to do the bare minimum to get by. All your accomplishments are just a bonus, something to enjoy, not requirements. You don't have to do anything to prove that you are worthy of existing.

The attitude of unconditional self-acceptance is probably the most important variable in their long-term recovery.

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.

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.

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.

Thinking rationally is often different from "positive thinking," in that it is a realistic assessment of the situation, with a view towards rectifying the problem if possible.

Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.

The great majority of the things we now make ourselves panicked about are self-created 'dangers' that exist almost entirely in our own imaginations.

Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.

To err is human; to forgive people and yourself for poor behavior is to be sensible and realistic.

In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has.

People are terrified of other people or difficult projects because they tell themselves that they could fail or be rejected. Failure can lead to sorrow, regret, frustration and annoyance - all healthy, negative feelings without which people couldn't exist. But then they add, "I absolutely must succeed and must be loved by significant persons, and if I don't, it's terrible and I'm no good." Those are irrational beliefs. As long as people keep them, they'll be terrified of life and will put themselves down when they get rejected.

Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.

Even when people act nastily to you, don't condemn them or retaliate.

Being assertive does not mean attacking or ignoring others feelings. It means that you are willing to hold up for yourself fairly-without attacking others.

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.

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 with them because, again, I don't care too much what other people think.

You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.

When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.

Failure doesn't have anything to do with your intrinsic value as a person.

Whatever may be, I am still largely the creator and ruler of my emotional destiny.

Convince yourself that worrying about many situations will make them worse rather than improve them.

In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.

You never truly need what you want. That is the main and thoroughgoing key to serenity.

Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

The goal...is not to change your desires and wishes but to persuade you to stop demanding that you absolutely must have what you wish-from yourself, from others, and from the world. You can by all means keep your wishes, preferences, and desires, but unless you prefer to remain needlessly anxious, not your grandiose demands.

Strong feelings are fine; it's the overreactions that mess us up.

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.

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.

The emotionally sound person should be able to take risks, to ask himself what he really would like to do in life, and then to try to do this, even though he has to risk defeat or failure. He should be adventurous (though not necessarily foolhardy); be willing to try almost anything once, just to see how he likes it; and look forward to some breaks in his usual life routines.

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency.

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.

We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming - or damning.

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.

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.