Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
IRVIN D. YALOMYour greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
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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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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.
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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
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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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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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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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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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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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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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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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If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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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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I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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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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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM