Albert Ellis Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  Real, Mean, Thinking

  124 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Inspirational, Believe, Optimistic

  174 Copy quote

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  Inspirational, Life, Happiness

  226 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Encouragement, Growth, Three

  163 Copy quote

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, Self, Healthy

  Albert Ellis (2010). “Overcoming Destructive Beliefs, Feelings, and Behaviors: New Directions for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy”, p.49, Prometheus Books

  148 Copy quote

• You mainly feel the way you think.

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, Way, Feels

  Albert Ellis, Jack Gordon, Michael Neenan, Stephen Palmer (2001). “Stress Counselling: A Rational Emotive Behaviour Approach”, p.182, SAGE

  127 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Strong, Feelings, Fine

  Albert Ellis, Arthur Lange (2016). “How To Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons”, p.28, Citadel

  26 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Worry, Anxiety, Situation

  32 Copy quote

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  Wise, Feel Better, Get Better

  78 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Failure, Past, Errors

  102 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, Worry, Anxiety

  31 Copy quote

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, Self, Feelings

  100 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Happiness, Responsibility, Destiny

  111 Copy quote

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  Philosophy, Years, Views

  38 Copy quote

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  Hate, Upset, Impossible

  107 Copy quote

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  People, Perception, Evaluation

  67 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Self, Imagination, Worry

  56 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Acceptance, Keys, Serenity

  31 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  Depression, Clinical Depression, Given

  38 Copy quote

• Worrying about dying will hardly help you live.

  Albert Ellis

  Worry, Dying, Helping

  18 Copy quote

• 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.

  Albert Ellis

  Nice, Accomplishment, Mind

  83 Copy quote

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

  Albert Ellis

  People, Belief, Preference

  34 Copy quote

• Humans can always accept themselves unconditionally.

  Albert Ellis

  Accepting, Humans

  6 Copy quote

• Stop shoulding on yourself

  Albert Ellis

  Albert Ellis, Emmett Charlton Velten (1992). “When AA Doesn't Work for You: Rational Steps to Quitting Alcohol”, Barricade Books Incorporated

  83 Copy quote

• Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.

  Albert Ellis

  Wise, Class, Neurosis

  82 Copy quote

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