Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOMLook out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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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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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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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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In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
IRVIN D. YALOM