Albert Ellis — American Psychologist born on September 27, 1913, died on June 24, 2007
Albert Ellis was an American psychologist who in 1955 developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. He held M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University and American Board of Professional Psychology. He also founded and was the President of the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute for decades. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapies. Based on a 1982 professional survey of USA and Canadian psychologists, he was considered as the second most influential psychotherapist in history... (wikipedia)
Albert Ellis Quotes
1. 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.
2. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling, and behaving today.
3. 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.
4. People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
5. People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing they can upset us.
6. You mainly feel the way you think.
7. Too many people are unaware that it is not outer events or circumstances that will create happiness; rather, it is our perception of events and of ourselves that will create, or uncreate, positive emotions.
8. If you elevate or defame yourself because of your performances, you will tend to be self-centered rather than problem-centered, and these performances will, consequently, tend to suffer.
9. Assume that most times when you feel anxious, depressed, or angry you are not only strongly desiring but also commanding that something go well and that you get what you want.
10. Worry about dying will hardly help you live.
11. The goal of life is to have a ball.
12. 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.
13. The easy way out is often just that - the 'easy' way out of the most rewarding lifestyle.
14. You only have to exist as you do and to live your life as best you can.
15. For a man there are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and women. It is often difficult to say which is the worst.
16. If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic.
17. It is impossible for you to be harmed by purely verbal or gestural attacks unless you specifically let yourself—or actually make yourself—be harmed.
18. When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.
19. You never truly need what you want. That is the main and thoroughgoing key to serenity.
20. There are a variety of techniques to help people change the kind of thinking that leads them to become depressed. These techniques are called cognitive behavioral therapy.
21. Feelings largely cause behavior. The way you feel, and how strongly, greatly influence how you will behave in a situation.
22. The art of love is largely the art of persistence.
23. 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.
24. Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love; and thereby seriously disturb yourself.
25. Give up the demand that you are only worthwhile if you are loved. Your worth does not change based on whether or not your beloved loves you back. Stop thinking that love gives you worth or value, instead, work to fully accept yourself.
26. The next time you feel angry, try to become aware of some of the physical sensations and changes that are occurring in your body.
27. You can choose to 1) keenly dislike your, other people's, and life's happenings 2) and still accept those adversities that you cannot now change.
28. Much of what we call emotion is nothing more or less than a certain kind - a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind - of thought.
29. Our self or personhood was too complex to be given a global rating.
30. To err is human; to forgive people and yourself for poor behavior is to be sensible and realistic.
31. There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.
32. Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.
33. The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably will ever be any absolute certainties, and should realize, that it is not all horrible, indeed - such a probabilistic, uncertain world.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. Men are not disturbed by things, but by the views which they take of them.
37. Because you upset yourself, therefore you, luckily can practically always un-upset the one person in the world whose thoughts and feelings you control - you!
38. Disputing your self-defeating, irrational beliefs is one of the main and most helpful methods of REBT.
39. If you would stop, really stop, damning yourself, others, and unkind conditions, you would find it impossible to upset yourself emotionally - about anything. Yes, anything.
40. Even injustice has its good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.
41. 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.
42. Failure doesn't have anything to do with your intrinsic value as a person.
43. People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.