Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
IRVIN D. YALOMMany people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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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.
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Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.
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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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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.
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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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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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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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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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.
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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