I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
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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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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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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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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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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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
IRVIN D. YALOM