The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMLife is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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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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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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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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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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.
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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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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