Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOMI never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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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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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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Living safely is dangerous.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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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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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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 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.
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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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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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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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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
IRVIN D. YALOM