To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
This 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.
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Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
IRVIN D. YALOM






