Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOMIf one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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 act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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Death 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.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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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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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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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.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM