Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
IRVIN D. YALOMTo the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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 more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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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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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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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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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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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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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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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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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