The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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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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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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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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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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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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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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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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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
IRVIN D. YALOM