This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
IRVIN D. YALOMThis was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
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Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
IRVIN D. YALOM