Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
IRVIN D. YALOMIf one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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Living safely is dangerous.
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This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
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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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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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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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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.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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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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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM