I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
IRVIN D. YALOMWere 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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.
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 -
When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
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 -
The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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