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.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhen people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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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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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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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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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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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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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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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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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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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 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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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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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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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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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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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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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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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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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!
IRVIN D. YALOM