I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.

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.

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency. If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic. People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware. Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world. Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional. The art of love is largely the art of persistence.

I don't recommend that people speak their minds to their bosses or to somebody who's directly over them. You need to know when to speak your mind and what the penalty will be for doing so. Sometimes it's worth it, and often it's not!

You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.

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.

The great majority of the things we now make ourselves panicked about are self-created 'dangers' that exist almost entirely in our own imaginations.