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. YALOMSome piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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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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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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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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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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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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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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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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
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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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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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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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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
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We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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