One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
IRVIN D. YALOMIt 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!
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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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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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When 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?
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
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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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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM






