Albert Ellis Thinking Quotations

We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.

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

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You mainly feel the way you think.

In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.

Thinking rationally is often different from "positive thinking," in that it is a realistic assessment of the situation, with a view towards rectifying the problem if possible.

If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing.

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, and I hope that REBT teaches them how to do it.

We teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.