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. YALOMSpecialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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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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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
IRVIN D. YALOM