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

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
Truly
Need
Needs
Never
Thoroughgoing
Serenity
Main
Acceptance
Keys

More quotes by Albert Ellis

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The goal of all life is to have a ball.
Albert Ellis
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The goal...is not to change your desires and wishes but to persuade you to stop demanding that you absolutely must have what you wish-from yourself, from others, and from the world. You can by all means keep your wishes, preferences, and desires, but unless you prefer to remain needlessly anxious, not your grandiose demands.
Albert Ellis
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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.
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Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.
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People could rationally decide that prolonged relationships take up too much time and effort and that they'd much rather do other kinds of things. But most people are afraid of rejection.
Albert Ellis
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People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.
Albert Ellis
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I started to call myself a rational therapist in January 1955 later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist. But from the start, I always included philosophic techniques as well as experiential, emotional and behavioral techniques.
Albert Ellis
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Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.
Albert Ellis
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I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs. In that sense, psychotherapy belongs in the schools.
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Strong feelings are fine it's the overreactions that mess us up.
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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
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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.
Albert Ellis
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You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
Albert Ellis
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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.
Albert Ellis
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I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.
Albert Ellis
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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.
Albert Ellis
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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
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The attitude of unconditional self-acceptance is probably the most important variable in their long-term recovery.
Albert Ellis
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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
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We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming - or damning.
Albert Ellis