Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOMPsychotherapy 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Living safely is dangerous.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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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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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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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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.
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
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Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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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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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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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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
IRVIN D. YALOM