Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
IRVIN D. YALOMPerhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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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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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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What? ‘Borderline patients play games’? That what you said? Ernest, you’ll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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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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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of 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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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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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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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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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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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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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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 must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
IRVIN D. YALOM