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.
Psychologists
Albert Ellis
American clinical psychologist (1913-2007) who founded rational therapy in 1955, later renamed rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). Trained in psychoanalysis at Columbia and the Karen Horney Institute, he broke with the Freudian school by 1953. His ABC model and the concept of irrational beliefs are direct progenitors of the entire cognitive behavioral therapy family. In a 1982 survey he was ranked the second most influential psychotherapist in history, ahead of Freud. He founded the non-profit Albert Ellis Institute in 1959, was controversially removed from its board in 2005, and was reinstated by court order in 2006. Famous for his confrontational style and outspoken views on sex and religion, he authored over 80 books before dying at 93.
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Albert Ellis's Other Quotes
There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.
The art of love is largely the art of persistence.
Related Quotes
Character is destiny.
-- Heraclitus
The exemplary person demands it of himself; the petty person demands it of others.
-- Confucius
If you are born poor it's not your mistake, but if you die poor it's your mistake.
-- Bill Gates
In life, you can blame a lot of people and you can wallow in self-pity, or you can pick yourself up and say, 'Listen, I have to be responsible for myself.'
-- Howard Schultz
I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.
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It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.
-- Abraham Maslow