A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMIf one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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 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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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
IRVIN D. YALOM