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.
IRVIN D. YALOMEvery person must choose how much truth he can stand.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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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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Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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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.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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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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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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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?
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM