The easy way out is often just that-the 'easy' way out of the most rewarding lifestyle.

If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.

Much of what we call emotion is nothing more or less than a certain kind - a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind - of thought.

Attempts to help humans eliminate all self-ratings and views self-esteem as a self-defeating concept that encourages them to make conditional evaluations of self. Instead, it teaches people unconditional self-acceptance.

This, perhaps, goes to show that conditional self-esteem, as I have said for many years, is an insidious, real sickness, so much so that even Buddhists carelessly sneak it in and sometimes encourage their clients to achieve it.

In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.

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