Albert Ellis Quotes

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.

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.

You mainly feel the way you think.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Worrying about dying will hardly help you live.

Lack of forgiveness of others breeds lack of self-forgiveness.

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.

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.

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