Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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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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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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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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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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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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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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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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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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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
IRVIN D. YALOM