One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
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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Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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 -
This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
IRVIN D. YALOM -
When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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 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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
I 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.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM