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.
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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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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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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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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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Living safely is dangerous.
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
IRVIN D. YALOM