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. YALOMDeath anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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It 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!
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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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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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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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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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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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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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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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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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.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
IRVIN D. YALOM