Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
IRVIN D. YALOMTo care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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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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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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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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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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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In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
IRVIN D. YALOM