Albert Ellis Quotes

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.

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.

There is a thread in our thoughts as there is a pulse in our feelings; he who can hold the one knows how to think, and he who can move the other knows how to feel.

Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

If you don't control your emotions, your emotions will control your acts, and that's not good.

When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions.

Emotions are products of our mind, and we can actually train ourselves to choose whether we banish or embrace them.

When the negative thoughts come - and they will; they come to all of us - it's not enough to just not dwell on it... You've got to replace it with a positive thought.

You might think that shifting your thoughts is as easy as setting your mind to it. But stressful thoughts aren't held in place through choice or will power. They're held in place through perceived truth value.

Most of us know when we are about to react emotionally. We can feel it. Often there is a brief warning before the amygdala hijack. For some of us, it is butterflies in the stomach; for some, it is an increased heart rate, and for others, it is a feeling of agitation.

How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there's a really important distinction to understand is that you can't completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don't ever make that separation for what goes on with them.

The problem is not what other people think, do or say; it is your reaction.

You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at this moment.

Irritability is immaturity of character. If you are subject to being cross and unpleasant with others for no apparent reason, you need to come face-to-face with the fact that you are thinking too much of yourself. After all, your feelings are not the most important thing in this world.

I'm now much more aware of my mental state. I have a lot more control over it and can choose how I feel.

No one has ever been able to control his thinking, although people may tell the story of how they have. I don't let go of my thoughts-I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me.

When people learn to master their feelings, they can soon learn to master their reflections and thoughts in the degree requisite for attaining the objects they are seeking. But while they yield to a feeling or spirit that distracts their minds from a subject they wish to study and learn, so long they will never gain the mastery of their minds.

It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.

All of us live at the feeling level, and our feelings are in large part a result of the way we perceive things. You observe or are told something, you interpret it, and only then do you have a reaction at the feeling level. The point is that feeling is preceded by perception, and all of us are capable of controlling our interpretation [the associations and assumptions] of what we see. If we can control our interpretation, then it logically follows that we can exercise some control over our feelings as well.

Despite not knowing if what he felt from moment to moment would pass or last forever, he entered fully into his shifting states of violent rage, self-pity, longing, heartbreak, cynicism, without losing the ability to think about what was happening to him. That took courage, I thought, living with the suffering in a mindful way, as an artifact of being, neither good nor bad.

Many people don't know about the power of good feelings, and so their feelings are reactions or responses to what happens to them. They have put their feelings on automatic pilot, instead of deliberately taking charge of them.

Choosing what we think rather than reaction to our emotions.

...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.

Think against your feelings; unmask the unbelief they have nourished; let evangelical thinking correct emotional thinking.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has, and I hope that REBT teaches them how to do it.