If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
IRVIN D. YALOMAnd if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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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.
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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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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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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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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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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.
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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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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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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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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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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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A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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!
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM