Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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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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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)
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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
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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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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!
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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 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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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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We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
IRVIN D. YALOM






