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

When I started to get disillusioned with psychoanalysis I reread philosophy and was reminded of the constructivist notion that Epictetus had proposed 2,000 years ago: "People are disturbed not by events that happen to them, but by their view of them." I could see how that applied to many of my clients.

Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.

If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing.

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.

When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.

I started to call myself a "rational therapist" in January 1955; later I used the term "rational emotive." Now I call myself a "rational emotive behavior therapist." But from the start, I always included philosophic techniques as well as experiential, emotional and behavioral techniques.