Albert Ellis quotes - page 4

Needing leads to bleeding - to almost all inevitable suffering. (Albert Ellis)
So I'd better stop my whining and help myself cope better with even the worst Adversities. View quote
Albert Ellis
Worry itself is one of the most painful conditions. View quote
Albert Ellis
Eating is always a decision, nobody forces your hand to pick up food and put it into your mouth. View quote
Albert Ellis
The individual is taught that there is nothing that he as a total person is to feel ashamed of or self-hating for. View quote
Albert Ellis
Humans can always accept themselves unconditionally. View quote
Albert Ellis
Attempts to help humans eliminate all self-ratings and views self-esteem as a self-defeating concept that encourages them to make conditional evaluations of self. Instead, it teaches people unconditional self-acceptance. View quote
Albert Ellis
The world consists mainly of love slobs who need other people's approval. Most people don't live their own lives very well. View quote
Albert Ellis
Whenever you avoid alarming situations, you almost always increase your anxiety about them. View quote
Albert Ellis
The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy, or law-abiding citizen. He will become a compulsive wrong-doer. View quote
Albert Ellis
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 ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed-such a probabilistic, uncertain world. (Albert Ellis)
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 feelings without which people couldn't exist. View quote
Albert Ellis
Freudian therapists do a lot of listening and very little persuading, and that was one of the reasons I eventually gave up being an analyst. You had to be too passive and not speak up, and you couldn't give homework to clients. While I was still an analyst, I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit psychoanalysis after practicing it for six years. View quote
Albert Ellis
Fat is a barrier, a bellicose statement to others that, to some, justifies hostility in kind. The world says to the fat person, "Your fatness is an affront to me, so we have the right to treat you as offensively as you appear." Fat is not merely viewed as another type of tissue, but as a diagnostic sign, a personal statement, and a measure of personality. Too little fat and we see you as being antisocial, fearful and sexless. Too much fat and we see you as slothful, stupid, and sexually hung up. View quote
Albert Ellis
My rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) was one of the very few therapies that was originated partly or largely because I wanted to be brief and efficient. And therefore right from the start I was active and directive. I tried to show people some central masturbatory core to their philosophy and to get them to work at changing it cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally. View quote
Albert Ellis
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. View quote
Albert Ellis
The Freudian tradition will never completely die because it has a few good points. For example, people have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware. Most of cognitive therapy has now adopted a similar idea. On the other hand, the relationship part of psychoanalysis - where you must have a deep, emotional relationship with the client - will, I think, get kicked in the teeth one of these days. View quote
Albert Ellis
Beginning in the 1960s, many studies showed that people who hold what we call irrational beliefs are significantly more disturbed than when they don't hold them, and the more strongly they hold them, the more disturbed they tend to be. View quote
Albert Ellis
Is self-esteem a sickness? That's according to the way you define it. In the usual way it is defined by people and by psychologists, I'd say that it is probably the greatest emotional disturbance known to man and woman. View quote
Albert Ellis
The easy way out is often just that-the 'easy' way out of the most rewarding lifestyle. View quote
Albert Ellis
I don't recommend that people speak their minds to their bosses or to somebody who's directly over them. You need to know when to speak your mind and what the penalty will be for doing so. Sometimes it's worth it, and often it's not! (Albert Ellis)
Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love; and thereby seriously disturb yourself. View quote
Albert Ellis
I would have liked having children to some degree, but frankly I haven't got the time to take the kids to the goddamn ballgame. So it would have had more disadvantages than advantages for them. View quote
Albert Ellis
There are three musts that hold us back: "I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy." And I sometimes think that as long as we keep the second must, which is socially learned, then some screwballs 100 years from now will manufacture atomic bombs in their bathtub and maybe annihilate the whole human race because they demand that the rest of the world must agree with their dogmas. When we don't agree, they may zap us. View quote
Albert Ellis
When I was 16 I started keeping a diary in which I recorded my disagreements with the famous philosophers. I didn't insist that they were wrong, that I was right and I had to prevail. I just agreed and disagreed with them. I thought there was a high degree of probability that I was right and some other thinkers were wrong. But I wasn't positive about it. View quote
Albert Ellis