Wit & Attitude Quote by David D. Burns

Bad moods don’t just happen to us, Burns argues; they recruit us. The “peculiar” trick is that sadness, anxiety, and irritation arrive with a persuasive inner narrator that sounds like sober realism. When you’re low, your brain doesn’t announce, “Here come distortions.” It offers a tight little story with the cadence of fact: nobody likes you, you always mess up, this will never change. Burns’s intent is both diagnostic and quietly accusatory: the misery isn’t only in the event, it’s in the interpretation you keep rehearsing.

The subtext is classic cognitive-behavioral therapy: feelings follow thoughts, and thoughts are editable. “We often fool ourselves” lands hard because it frames suffering as self-generated without blaming the sufferer as weak. It’s not moral failure; it’s a glitch in the mind’s meaning-making machine. The sentence is also calibrated for agency. If the problem is “telling ourselves things that simply are not true,” then the intervention is not willpower or positive vibes but verification: What’s the evidence? What’s the alternative explanation? What would I say to a friend?

Context matters. Burns, best known for popularizing CBT to mass audiences, writes in a therapeutic register that avoids mystique. He names the enemy as a common habit: confusing mood-congruent thoughts with objective reality. The quote works because it punctures the romance of “trust your feelings” without dismissing feeling itself. It makes emotional pain legible as a pattern - and patterns, unlike fates, can be interrupted.