You mainly feel the way you think.
— Albert Ellis
Inspiring Cognitive Behavioral Therapy quotations
Don't ask why the patient is the way he is, ask for what he would change.
There are a variety of techniques to help people change the kind of thinking that leads them to become depressed. These techniques are called cognitive behavioral therapy.
Things may happen around you, and things may happen to you, but the only things that matter are the things that happen in you.
We must take care of our minds because we cannot benefit from beauty when our brains are missing.
Because of my bipolar disorder, I tend to these mixed states, which are depressed but loud and agitated. So I can be terribly irritable. I go to cognitive behavioral therapy in order not to yell at my children.
The depressed man lives in a depressed world.
The individual is taught that there is nothing that he as a total person is to feel ashamed of or self-hating for.
Whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind.
He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.
If my body is enslaved, still my mind is free.
The origin of sorrow is this: to wish for something that does not come to pass.
Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.
Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.
The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises;
namely, the complete denial of 'identity.'
His own character is the arbiter of every ones fortune.
Put from you the belief that 'I have been wronged', and with it will go the feeling. Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.
We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.
Thoughts are mightier than strength of hand.
I would like to be remembered as one of the individuals who founded, ideologically and practically, cognitive behavior therapy and who pioneered multimodal or integrated therapy.
Buddhists were actually the first cognitive-behavioral therapists.
The relish of good and evil depends in a great measure upon the opinion we have of them.
Things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within.
Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.
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.
Our contention is not that medication alone is the answer.
We really need to have it in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy and with peer support. And that needs to be reimbursed [by health insurers], because it shows huge reductions in overall spending.
Everybody has their reasons.
