Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOMTherapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s 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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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 think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
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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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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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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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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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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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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 care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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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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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.
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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
IRVIN D. YALOM