Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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 -
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.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
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.
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If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
IRVIN D. YALOM