I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
IRVIN D. YALOMI don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
IRVIN D. YALOMNever take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
IRVIN D. YALOMPerhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOMSome day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
IRVIN D. YALOMSome sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
IRVIN D. YALOMDespair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
IRVIN D. YALOMReality 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. YALOMNone of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
IRVIN D. YALOMI dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
IRVIN D. YALOMSince 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.
IRVIN D. YALOMOne 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.
IRVIN D. YALOMRather, 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.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhen 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?
IRVIN D. YALOMIf people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOMA focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMHidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
IRVIN D. YALOM