Quote

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
Needs
Never
Thoroughgoing
Serenity
Main
Acceptance
Keys
Truly
Need

More quotes by Albert Ellis

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Humans can always accept themselves unconditionally.
Albert Ellis
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You mainly feel the way you think.
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.
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I would like to be remembered as one of the individuals who founded, ideologically and practically, cognitive behavior therapy and who pioneered multimodal or integrated therapy.
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We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
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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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Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.
Albert Ellis
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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.
Albert Ellis
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People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.
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I teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.
Albert Ellis
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Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.
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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
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People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
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Even when people act nastily to you, don't condemn them or retaliate.
Albert Ellis
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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.
Albert Ellis
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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.
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Much of what we call emotion is nothing more or less than a certain kind - a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind - of thought.
Albert Ellis
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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.
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.
Albert Ellis
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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.
Albert Ellis