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.
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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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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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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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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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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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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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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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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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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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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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 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 drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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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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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
IRVIN D. YALOM