Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
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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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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
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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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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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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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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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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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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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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.
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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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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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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
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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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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM