If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
IRVIN D. YALOMIf we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
IRVIN D. YALOMA focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMDeath anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
IRVIN D. YALOMPerhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOMDeath cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
IRVIN D. YALOMThis 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.
IRVIN D. YALOMYou know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
IRVIN D. YALOMI 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.
IRVIN D. YALOMIt 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. YALOMMany people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
IRVIN D. YALOMDespite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
IRVIN D. YALOMA sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
IRVIN D. YALOMMature love is loving, not being loved.
IRVIN D. YALOMIt’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.
IRVIN D. YALOMOnly 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.
IRVIN D. YALOMHe 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)
IRVIN D. YALOM