Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.
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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There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.
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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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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.
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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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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
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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.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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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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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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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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.
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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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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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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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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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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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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
IRVIN D. YALOM