A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMLove is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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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.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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!
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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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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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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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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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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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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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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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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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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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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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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM