Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Mature love is loving, not being loved.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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 -
I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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!
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 -
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