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We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.

Albert Ellis

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Albert Ellis
Age: 93 †
Born: 1913
Born: September 27
Died: 2007
Died: July 24
Behaviour Therapist
Cognitive Scientist
Non-Fiction Writer
Psychologist
Sex Educator
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
People
Upset
Teach
Feeling
Feelings
Past
Change
Today
Thinking
Behaving

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I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955 later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.
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Lack of forgiveness of others breeds lack of self-forgiveness.
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Eating is always a decision, nobody forces your hand to pick up food and put it into your mouth.
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Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. Had I not been a therapist, I would have been an efficiency expert.
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Whatever may be, I am still largely the creator and ruler of my emotional destiny.
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Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love and thereby seriously disturb yourself.
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Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.
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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.
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Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.
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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.
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You mainly feel the way you think.
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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.
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We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming - or damning.
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For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
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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.
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If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing.
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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.
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Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.
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By honestly acknowledging your past errors, but never damning yourself for them, you can learn to use your past for your own future benefit.
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There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women or that men are more willing to surrender their irrational beliefs. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.
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