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.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhen that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of 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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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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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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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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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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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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.
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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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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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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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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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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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There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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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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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
IRVIN D. YALOM