Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOMPsychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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Some 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.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
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Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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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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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
IRVIN D. YALOM