A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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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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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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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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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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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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.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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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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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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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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.
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This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
IRVIN D. YALOM