Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

I don't want to be idealized by a patient because of what I've written.

More in love with desire than with the desired!

We cannot avoid this responsibility, this freedom.

Too often, we therapists neglect our personal relationships. Our work becomes our life.

The more the therapist is able to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing, the less need there is for the therapist to embrace orthodoxy.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?

I have others who rob me of my solitude, and yet do not truly offer me company.

It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.

Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.

He who would be everything cannot be anything.)

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness - domains soaked in anxiety.

Sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said that if he had eight hours to cut down a tree, he'd spend several of these hours sharpening his ax.

Use of masturbation as a way of soothing yourself to ward off death anxiety so you can fall asleep.

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer

I've always regarded therapy more as a calling than a profession, a way of life for people who care about others.

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?

Each time a goal is attained, it merely breeds additional needs. Thus more scurrying, more seeking, ad infinitum.

If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the 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

I submit that God has no wishes about how, or even if, we glorify Him. Allow me, then, Jacob, to love God in my own fashion. Franco's

the flame of belief is fueled inexhaustibly by the fears of death, oblivion, and meaninglessness. Where

My task as a therapist (not unlike that of a parent) is to make myself obsolete - to help a patient become his or her own mother and father

That just seems to be the way we're built.

I'm not ready for a committed relationship with anyone and that I have a ton of work to do on myself.

Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.

I'm listening. Sometimes I see better with closed eyes.

I should have become an "I" before I became a "we".

As a general rule, the less one's sense of life fulfillment, the greater one's death anxiety.

Mature love is loving, not being loved.

Look out the other's window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.

The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.

Living safely is dangerous.

A nightmare is a failed dream, a dream that, by not "handling" anxiety, has failed in its role as the guardian of sleep.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

As Nietzsche said, "If we have our own 'why' of life, we shall get along with any 'how.

Nonetheless, the past is part of your present consciousness - it forms the spectacles through which you experience the present.

more commonly death anxiety surfaces in nightmares. A

Do not pander, patronize, scheme, or strategize," his instincts told him. "Simply go about your business in your usual professional manner." "But

I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.

The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else ...

Freedom means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, one's own life situation. Though

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

Don't argue: you will lose, and even if you win, you lose.

I'm looking for me in you, that my hollowness makes it impossible to identify my needs and my desires,

Fame, for example, consists of the opinions of others and requires that we must live our life as others wish.

Love obsession often serves as a distraction, keeping the individual's gaze from more painful thoughts.

It's no great mystery. If no one will listen, it's only natural to shout!

So the highest and the happiest of endeavors is to be a philosopher ? Doesn't it seem self-serving for a philosopher to make that claim?

I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.

Have you ever noticed that the air you breathe in is always cooler than the air you breathe out?

[T]he act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

But surely," Breuer

The ultimate goal of therapy ... it's too hard a question. The words come to me like tranquility, like fulfillment, like realizing your potential.

I should have become an "I" because I became a "we".

His visitor must have sensed her misstep, Breuer thought, noticing how she rushed to continue her narrative.

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

Right, that's exactly what I mean by your being both the prisoner and the jailer.

Do not mistake awkwardness for callousness. Remember, I am a solitary person, as I warned you. I'm not accustomed to easy and warm social exchange.

Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)

Lucretius' maxim: 'Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.

For one can never really be helped by another; one must find the strength to help oneself.

To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.

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)

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. Though

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

It's the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals - my professional rosary.

I remain convinced that a therapist's judicious self-disclosure facilitates the course of therapy. Love's

Should we not create - should we not become - before we reproduce? Our responsibility to life is to create the higher, not to reproduce the lower.

If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.

I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars
always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight.

You are not a cow, and I am no apostle of cud chewing.

Hair and hole, horn and teeth - hedgehog, walrus, ape, Josef Breuer. He

One must learn to live with the living before one can learn to live with the dead.

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.

One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

Thought training and behavior shaping! These methods are not for the human realm! Ach, we're not animal trainers!" "Yes,

When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

This world is supposed to have been made by a God? No, much better by a devil!

Perhaps," said Nietzsche, "only by being a man does a man release the woman in woman.

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.

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.

Absolutely, bring any kind of carrot cake you wish.

The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.

What have your scholarly investigations shown you?" No

Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated.

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

Every act is not necessarily a message about the relationship.

One thing he resolved was not to make that one good year a bad year by grieving that it was not more than

mediating efforts, the

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing them into our own preferred ideas and gestalts...

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.