Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
IRVIN D. YALOMOnly 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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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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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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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOM