Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
IRVIN D. YALOMThis 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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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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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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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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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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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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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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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOM