The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
IRVIN D. YALOMMirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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
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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
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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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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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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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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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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)
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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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The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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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.
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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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