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. YALOMSome have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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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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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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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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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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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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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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