Albert Ellis Quotes

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.

There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.

People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. 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.

If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.

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.

The art of love is largely the art of persistence.

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.

I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition.