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

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.
View this figure's profile
Albert Ellis's Other Quotes
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.
The art of love is largely the art of persistence.
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.
Related Quotes
Everything depends on your judgment, and that judgment rests with you.
-- Marcus Aurelius
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.
-- Seneca
Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
-- John F. Kennedy
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Equanimity.
-- Antoninus Pius
Berlin is the testicles of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.
-- Nikita Khrushchev