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. YALOMEvery person must choose how much truth he can stand.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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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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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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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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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
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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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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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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
IRVIN D. YALOM