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. YALOMOnly the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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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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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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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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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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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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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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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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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)
IRVIN D. YALOM