Albert Ellis quotes

Albert Ellis was an American psychologist who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). This innovative approach has greatly influenced modern cognitive-behavioral therapy and psychological treatment. He is recognized as one of the most influential figures in the field of psychotherapy. Here are 104 of his quotes:

The art of love... is largely the art of persistence.

Albert Ellis

You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.

Albert Ellis

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.

Albert Ellis

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

Albert Ellis

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

Albert Ellis

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.

Albert Ellis

I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.

Albert Ellis

Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.

Albert Ellis

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.

Albert Ellis

I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn't love them back. They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression.

Albert Ellis

I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.

Albert Ellis

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.

Albert Ellis

If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.

Albert Ellis

I regret that I've been so busy with clinical work that I haven't been able to spend much time on experiments and outcome studies.

Albert Ellis

There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

Albert Ellis

Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.

Albert Ellis

Most people would have given up when faced with all the criticism I've received over the years.

Albert Ellis

People could rationally decide that prolonged relationships take up too much time and effort and that they'd much rather do other kinds of things. But most people are afraid of rejection.

Albert Ellis

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.

Albert Ellis

Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.

Albert Ellis

In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.

Albert Ellis

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

Albert Ellis