Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
IRVIN D. YALOMI 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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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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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.
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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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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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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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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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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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When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM