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.
IRVIN D. YALOMNot to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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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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One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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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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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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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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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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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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