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.
IRVIN D. YALOMSelf-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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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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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
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Religion 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.
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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 spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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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.
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
IRVIN D. YALOM






