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.
IRVIN D. YALOMAs 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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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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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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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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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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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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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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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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Living safely is dangerous.
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I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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