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To err is human to forgive people and yourself for poor behavior is to be sensible and realistic.

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
Behavior
Poor
Human
Humans
Sensible
People
Realistic
Forgive
Forgiveness
Forgiving

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Many psychoanalysts refused to let me speak at their meetings. They were exceptionally vigorous because I had previously been an analyst and they were very angry at my flying the coop.
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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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We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
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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.
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You mainly feel the way you think.
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Worry itself is one of the most painful conditions.
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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.
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The world consists mainly of love slobs who need other people's approval. Most people don't live their own lives very well.
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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.
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Even when people act nastily to you, don't condemn them or retaliate.
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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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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.
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There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.
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People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.
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Reality is not so much what happens to us rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.
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In the old days we used to get more referrals, because people had insurance that paid for therapy. Now they belong to HMOs, and we can only be affiliated with a few HMOs.
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Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.
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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.
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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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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.
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