Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
IRVIN D. YALOMSome sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
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If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
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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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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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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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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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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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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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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
IRVIN D. YALOM