101 Quotes by William Glasser

When you study great teachers... you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style.

The day we stop playing will be the day we stop learning.

In essence, we gain self-respect through discipline and closeness to others through love. Discipline must always have within it the element of love. "I care enough about you to force you to act in a better way, in a way you will learn through experience to know, and I already know, is the right way." Similarly, love must always have an element of discipline. "I love you because you are a worthwhile person, because I respect you and feel you respect me as well as yourself.

[P]atients, no matter what their psychiatric complaint, suffer from a universal defect: they are unable to fulfill their needs in a realistic way and have taken some less realistic way in their unsuccessful attempts to do so.

Therapy is a special kind of teaching or training which attempts to accomplish in a relatively short, intense period what should have established during normal growing up.

Choice Theory explains that, for all practical purposes, we choose everything we do.

Sessions which do not bear directly on the patient's problems are not as wasted as long as they relate to his growing awareness that he is a part of the world and that perhaps he can cope with it. When values, standards, and responsibility are in the background, all discussion is relevant to therapy.

Because the patient must gain responsibility right now, we always focus on the present.[...] The present, the right now, is the critical task, not the easy job of recounting his historical irresponsibility and looking for excuses. Why become involved with the irresponsible person he was? We want to become involved with the responsible person we know he can be.

In Reality Therapy emotions and happiness are never divorced from behavior. Gaining insight into the unconscious thinking which accompanies aberrant behavior is not an objective; excuses for deviant behavior are not accepted and one's history is not made more important than one's present life.