Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOMLook out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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. YALOM -
Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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)
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
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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
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
IRVIN D. YALOM