Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.
To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
...the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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
The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I'd like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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.
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.
Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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)
Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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.
Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?
Credinta, oricat de pasionata, de pura, de arzatoare, nu spune absolut nimic despre realitatea existentei lui Dumnezeu
That just seems to be the way we’re built.
The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.