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. YALOMThe more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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.
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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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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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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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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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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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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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.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
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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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM






