So I'd better stop my whining and help myself cope better with even the worst Adversities.

In the old days we used to get more referrals, because people had insurance that paid for therapy. Now they belong to HMOs, and we can only be affiliated with a few HMOs.

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.

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.

When I was 16 I started keeping a diary in which I recorded my disagreements with the famous philosophers. I didn't insist that they were wrong, that I was right and I had to prevail. I just agreed and disagreed with them. I thought there was a high degree of probability that I was right and some other thinkers were wrong. But I wasn't positive about it.

Many psychoanalysts refused to let me speak at their meetings. They were exceptionally vigorous because I had previously been an analyst and they were very angry at my flying the coop.

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.