Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
IRVIN D. YALOMYour greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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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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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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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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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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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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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
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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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We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
IRVIN D. YALOM