The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMIf you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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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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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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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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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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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We 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.
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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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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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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM