Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOMThere is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
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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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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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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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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
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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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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
IRVIN D. YALOM






