Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
IRVIN D. YALOMA sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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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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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
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Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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Some 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.
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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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM