Living safely is dangerous.
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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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
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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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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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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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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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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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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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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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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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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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
IRVIN D. YALOM