There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.
IRVIN D. YALOMHeidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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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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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
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Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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 creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
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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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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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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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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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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
IRVIN D. YALOM