Quote

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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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
Others
Demand
Preference
Change
Unless
Wishes
Must
Stop
Anxious
Mean
Goal
Demands
Needlessly
World
Wish
Desires
Preferences
Desire
Prefer
Grandiose
Means
Remain
Persuade
Keep
Absolutely
Demanding

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For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
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People are terrified of other people or difficult projects because they tell themselves that they could fail or be rejected. Failure can lead to sorrow, regret, frustration and annoyance-all healthy feelings without which people couldn't exist.
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The great majority of the things we now make ourselves panicked about are self-created 'dangers' that exist almost entirely in our own imaginations.
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Needing leads to bleeding - to almost all inevitable suffering.
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If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.
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And just as two wrongs don't make a right, rage against offenders is probably the worst way to try to correct them.
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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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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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I'm very happy. I like my work and the various aspects of it - going around the world, teaching the gospel according to St. Albert.
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We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming - or damning.
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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.
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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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Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.
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The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed—such a probabilistic, uncertain 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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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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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.
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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.
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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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