A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhen people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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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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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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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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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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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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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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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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Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
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I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
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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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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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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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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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There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM