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
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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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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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
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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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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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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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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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What? ‘Borderline patients play games’? That what you said? Ernest, you’ll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis.
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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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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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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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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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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
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We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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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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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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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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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
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One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
IRVIN D. YALOM