Albert Ellis Quotes

Think against your feelings; unmask the unbelief they have nourished; let evangelical thinking correct emotional thinking.

The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your 'cognitions,' or thoughts. A cognition refers to the way you look at things - your perceptions, mental attitudes, and beliefs. It includes the way you interpret things - what you say. about something or someone to yourself.

My job is making irrational people do rational things.

If you are willing to change your thinking, you can change your feelings. If you change your feelings, you can change your actions. And changing your actions - based on good thinking - can change your life.

My rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) was one of the very few therapies that was originated partly or largely because I wanted to be brief and efficient. And therefore right from the start I was active and directive. I tried to show people some central masturbatory core to their philosophy and to get them to work at changing it cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally.

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.

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.

Of course I get angry, but I want to use my brain a little bit and not just smash things.

Thoughts aren't fact, so don't take them seriously

You gotta learn how to think right before you can live right.

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.

As you go through life, don’t let your feelings-real as they are-invalidate your need to let the truth of God’s words guide your thinking. Remember that the path to your heart travels through your mind. Truth matters.

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Only when you combine sound intellect with emotional discipline do you get rational behavior.

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.

Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.

Comparing the three domains, I found that for jobs of all kinds, emotional competencies were twice as prevalent among distinguishing competencies as were technical skills and purely cognitive abilities combined. In general the higher a position in an organization, the more EI mattered: for individuals in leadership positions, 85 percent of their competencies were in the EI domain.

So the first step in seeking happiness is learning. We first have to learn how negative emotions and behaviors are harmful to us and how positive emotions are helpful.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

I am an emotional pitcher, but I can control it. When I was in high school, I was a little immature and I let my emotions get the best of me.

Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as cognitive ability and technical skill combined.

Most people here don't have a wide emotional range. It's just the type of people astronauts are, they're required to be level.

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.