Albert Ellis Quotes

I don't know very much but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it…My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

In religion, there's a certain type of fear that if somebody believes differently from me, that it's a threat. Because I'm right, and there cannot be two ways that are right, so if I'm right, anything different than this must be wrong; and we attack those things and it's really due to insecurity, ego and fear.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

It's hard for the majority of people to accept what they don't understand.

I saw that there are people who will connive against innovation. They're hostile to it. And that has shaped my behavior ever since.

There are people who never experience that, who remain closed until death, from fear of change.

Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar.... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

When we are accustomed to use bad reasons for proving natural effects, we are not willing to receive good reasons when they are discovered

Every reactionary lacks intellectual independence.

Sadly, in the highest levels of economic thought in government, questions are not tolerated. It is as if we're dealing with the binary thinking of a fundamentalist religion.

It's simple-minded people like that, the ones that are afraid of change, they use everything in their power to defend what they stand up for instead of trying to listen and understand what's going on.

People can be in a prison of their own mind. [There are] people who don't have their hearts open to other people's ideas, and can't listen to other people's ideas without feeling like they're being slapped in the face. Those people are more in a prison.

Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble . It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.

Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.

They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

At length weariness succeeds to labor, and the mind lies at ease in the contemplation of her own attainments without any desire of new conquests or excursions. This is the age of recollection and narrative; the opinions are settled, and the avenues of apprehension shut against any new intelligence; the days that are to follow must pass in the inculcation of precepts already collected, and assertion of tenets already received; nothing is henceforward so odious as opposition, so insolent as doubt, or so dangerous as novelty.

The fact is that people would rather cling when they're afraid of something to a priori beliefs than rather open their minds about it.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

(...) being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem. (...) this terror of being wrong means that people have enormous difficulties in changing ideas.

A narrow mind begets obstinacy; we do not easily believe what we cannot see.