I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
IRVIN D. YALOMI 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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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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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
IRVIN D. YALOM