If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOMRather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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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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Living safely is dangerous.
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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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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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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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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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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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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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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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
IRVIN D. YALOM