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.
IRVIN D. YALOMThere 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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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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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
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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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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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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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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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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.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
IRVIN D. YALOM