In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
IRVIN D. YALOMLive your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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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Living safely is dangerous.
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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
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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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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
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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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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
IRVIN D. YALOM