The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOMOne 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.
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.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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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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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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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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I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
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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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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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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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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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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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
IRVIN D. YALOM