Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOMIf 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
IRVIN D. YALOM -
To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
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This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
IRVIN D. YALOM