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.
IRVIN D. YALOMMature love is loving, not being loved.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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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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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
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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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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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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.
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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
IRVIN D. YALOM