If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
IRVIN D. YALOMDespite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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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If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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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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In 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.
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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 have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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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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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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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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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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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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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Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
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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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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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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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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM