Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOMReligion 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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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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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM