Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOMI thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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 -
The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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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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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Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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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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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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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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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