Quote

Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

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
Goal
Happiness
Attained
Next
Striving
Nature
Largely
Always
Endeavor
Things
Experienced
Strive
Towards

More quotes by 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.
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You have only to exist as you do and to live your life as best you can.
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The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own.
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In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.
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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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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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When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.
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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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I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.
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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.
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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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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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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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I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young women in public.
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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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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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If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.
Albert Ellis
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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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Convince yourself that worrying about many situations will make them worse rather than improve them.
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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