Top 100 Albert Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”

— Albert Ellis

2. “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

Featured in: Psychology Quotes

3. “People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.”

— Albert Ellis

4. “Being assertive does not mean attacking or ignoring others feelings. It means that you are willing to hold up for yourself fairly-without attacking others.”

— Albert Ellis

5. “You mainly feel the way you think.”

— Albert Ellis

6. “Stop shoulding on yourself.”

— Albert Ellis

7. “By honestly acknowledging your past errors, but never damning yourself for them, you can learn to use your past for your own future benefit.”

— Albert Ellis

8. “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.”

— Albert Ellis

9. “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

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

— Albert Ellis

11. “Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.”

— Albert Ellis

12. “People don’t just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.”

— Albert Ellis

13. “The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better. But you don’t get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.”

— Albert Ellis

14. “Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.”

— Albert Ellis

15. “Whatever may be, I am still largely the creator and ruler of my emotional destiny.”

— Albert Ellis

16. “Convince yourself that worrying about many situations will make them worse rather than improve them.”

— Albert Ellis

17. “Strong feelings are fine; it’s the overreactions that mess us up.”

— Albert Ellis

Featured in: Strong Quotes

18. “Thinking rationally is often different from “positive thinking,” in that it is a realistic assessment of the situation, with a view towards rectifying the problem if possible.”

— Albert Ellis

19. “The attitude of unconditional self-acceptance is probably the most important variable in their long-term recovery.”

— Albert Ellis

20. “Lack of forgiveness of others breeds lack of self-forgiveness.”

— Albert Ellis

21. “If you would stop, really stop, damning yourself, others, and unkind conditions, you would find it almost impossible to upset yourself emotionally – about anything. Yes, anything.”

— Albert Ellis

22. “Needing leads to bleeding – to almost all inevitable suffering.”

— Albert Ellis

23. “To err is human; to forgive people and yourself for poor behavior is to be sensible and realistic.”

— Albert Ellis

24. “And just as two wrongs don’t make a right, rage against offenders is probably the worst way to try to correct them.”

— Albert Ellis

25. “The art of love is largely the art of persistence.”

— Albert Ellis

26. “People are terrified of other people or difficult projects because they tell themselves that they could fail or be rejected. Failure can lead to sorrow, regret, frustration and annoyance-all healthy feelings without which people couldn’t exist.”

— Albert Ellis

27. “The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed – such a probabilistic, uncertain world.”

— Albert Ellis

28. “By not caring too much about what people think, I’m able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.”

— Albert Ellis

Featured in: Bullying Quotes

29. “If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them.”

— Albert Ellis

30. “Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it’s conditional.”

— Albert Ellis

31. “Whenever you avoid alarming situations, you almost always increase your anxiety about them.”

— Albert Ellis

32. “Even when people act nastily to you, don’t condemn them or retaliate.”

— Albert Ellis

33. “If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they’ll kill themselves laughing.”

— Albert Ellis

34. “If something is irrational, that means it won’t work. It’s usually unrealistic.”

— Albert Ellis

35. “The easy way out is often just that-the ‘easy’ way out of the most rewarding lifestyle.”

— Albert Ellis

36. “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

37. “Failure doesn’t have anything to do with your intrinsic value as a person.”

— Albert Ellis

38. “The great majority of the things we now make ourselves panicked about are self-created ‘dangers’ that exist almost entirely in our own imaginations.”

— Albert Ellis

39. “Worry itself is one of the most painful conditions.”

— Albert Ellis

40. “You never truly need what you want. That is the main and thoroughgoing key to serenity.”

— Albert Ellis

41. “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

42. “Most things worth having require some sacrifice, usually more than you expect.”

— Albert Ellis

43. “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

44. “You have only to exist as you do and to live your life as best you can.”

— Albert Ellis

45. “Is self-esteem a sickness? That’s according to the way you define it. In the usual way it is defined by people and by psychologists, I’d say that it is probably the greatest emotional disturbance known to man and woman.”

— Albert Ellis

46. “People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.”

— Albert Ellis

47. “Much of what we call emotion is nothing more or less than a certain kind – a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind – of thought.”

— Albert Ellis

48. “The goal of all life is to have a ball.”

— Albert Ellis

49. “In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.”

— Albert Ellis

50. “So I’d better stop my whining and help myself cope better with even the worst Adversities.”

— Albert Ellis