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. YALOMHidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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?
IRVIN D. YALOM -
I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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 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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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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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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.
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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
IRVIN D. YALOM