Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOMMirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
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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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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
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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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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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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.
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Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
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Living safely is dangerous.
IRVIN D. YALOM