If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOMIn a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.
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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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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
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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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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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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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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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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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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 dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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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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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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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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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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
IRVIN D. YALOM