When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
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Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.
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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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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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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.
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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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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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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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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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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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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM