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. YALOMLive right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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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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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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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.
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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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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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What? ‘Borderline patients play games’? That what you said? Ernest, you’ll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis.
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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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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM