Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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
-
-
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOM -
If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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 -
When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM