The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
IRVIN D. YALOMLiving safely is dangerous.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Living safely is dangerous.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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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!
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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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There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.
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The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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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 we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
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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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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
IRVIN D. YALOM