Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
IRVIN D. YALOMThis 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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 -
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 -
The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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 -
I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
IRVIN D. YALOM