If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
IRVIN D. YALOMDoes a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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 as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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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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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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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
IRVIN D. YALOM