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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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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
Action
Back
Better
Feel
Therapy
Feels
Helps
Wise
Trouble
Helping

More quotes by Albert Ellis

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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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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.
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.
Albert Ellis
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I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair that's the human condition.
Albert Ellis
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If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them.
Albert Ellis
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We'd better work hard on getting rid of that must - Other people must do what I want them to do! It's what makes people hostile, nasty, mean and combative, and it leads to feuds, wars and genocide. We'd better do something about that.
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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As a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.
Albert Ellis
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Even when people act nastily to you, don't condemn them or retaliate.
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.
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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People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
Albert Ellis
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As a matter of fact, as a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.
Albert Ellis
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The individual is taught that there is nothing that he as a total person is to feel ashamed of or self-hating for.
Albert Ellis
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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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When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.
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.
Albert Ellis
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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.
Albert Ellis
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The art of love is largely the art of persistence.
Albert Ellis
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I regret that I've been so busy with clinical work that I haven't been able to spend much time on experiments and outcome studies.
Albert Ellis