Albert Ellis Quotes

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

I'm trying to get more into other things, where reality is nothing but each individual's way of thinking.

What you think is real is your reality.

Yeah. Iʼve always felt this way. I mean weʼre born alone, we die alone. And while weʼre here we are absolutely, completely sealed in our own bodies. Really weird. Kinda freaks me out to think about it. We can only experience the outside world through our own slanted perception of it. Who knows what youʼre really like. I just see what I think youʼre like.

Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

The world in your mind is as real as the world outside of it.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

We each create our world by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinction that makes sense to us. We then 'see' the world through the self we have created.

Our experience of many life circumstances is a function of our personal perspective and not the circumstance itself.

The prism through which you experience life is so unique. There is no objective experience.

All is as thinking makes it so

You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.

I never believe I'm presenting objective reality; I also don't want to delude people into thinking that my subject is talking directly to them.

Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious.

'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?' Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?'

The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.

As you are, so is the world.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

I create my own reality. And I'm not the only one. My reality is becoming more prominent.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.