Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOMMarriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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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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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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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
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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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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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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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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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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
IRVIN D. YALOM