Albert Ellis Quotes

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

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

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

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.

This, perhaps, goes to show that conditional self-esteem, as I have said for many years, is an insidious, real sickness, so much so that even Buddhists carelessly sneak it in and sometimes encourage their clients to achieve it.

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

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.

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.

Needing leads to bleeding – to almost all inevitable suffering.

People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.

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.

Most people would have given up when faced with all the criticism I’ve received over the years.