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.
IRVIN D. YALOMIt 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!
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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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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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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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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This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
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Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
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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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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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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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM