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. YALOMThe path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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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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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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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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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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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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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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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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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