Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
IRVIN D. YALOMI 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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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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Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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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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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 must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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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 death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
IRVIN D. YALOM






