Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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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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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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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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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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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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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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
IRVIN D. YALOM