Living safely is dangerous.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
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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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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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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Were 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.
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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
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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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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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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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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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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
IRVIN D. YALOM