Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOMWe take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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 dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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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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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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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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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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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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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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 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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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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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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
IRVIN D. YALOM