There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
IRVIN D. YALOMThere 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Living safely is dangerous.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
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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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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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM