Irvin D. Yalom
The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.Collection: Death
I think all kinds of meanings in life transcend your self. They're linked to other generations of people around us, to our children and our family. We're passing on something of ourselves to others. I feel that's what makes our life full of meaning.Collection: Family
I'm a compulsive reader of fiction. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. My wife Marilyn and I... our initial friendship began because we are both readers. I've gone to sleep almost every night of my life after having read in a novel for 30 or 40 minutes. I'm a great reader of fiction and much less so of non-fiction.Collection: Friendship
I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy - I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection.Collection: Romantic
I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.
The ultimate goal of therapy... it's too hard a question. The words come to me like tranquility, like fulfillment, like realizing your potential.
When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
We're 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.
Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful.
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.
We're passing on something of ourselves to others. I feel that's what makes our life full of meaning. It's hard to have meaning in a closet, encapsulated by nothing. I think you really have to expand yourself and your life and do what you can for other people.
From the very early days of seeing patients, I noticed that many of them seemed to be concerned with issues of their mortality, and so the philosophy training I had taken began to seem rather important to me.
I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed.
During my childhood, Washington was a segregated city, and I lived in the midst of a poor black neighborhood. Life on the streets was often perilous. Indoor reading was my refuge, and twice a week, I made the hazardous bicycle trek to the central library at Seventh and K streets to stock up on supplies.
I don't want to be idealized by a patient because of what I've written.
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.
I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called 'The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,' and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.
With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.
I always wanted to be a writer. Maybe, had I been brought up in another generation, I might have just gone into writing rather than medicine - which is not to say that I didn't also have a great attraction towards the idea of being a healer. Fortunately, I've been able to combine the two in ways I could never possibly have imagined.
Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.Collection: Live Your Life
The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.Collection: May
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. 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.Collection: Growth
If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.Collection: Pain
To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.Collection: Mean
Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.Collection: Persons
If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.Collection: Tragedy
Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)Collection: Heal
Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. 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.Collection: Self
Living safely is dangerous.Collection: Dangerous
Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love. 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.Collection: Falling In Love
Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.Collection: Existence
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. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. 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?Collection: Memories
I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion. Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.Collection: Thinking
The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.Collection: Anxiety
Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.Collection: Trying
... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.Collection: Giving Up
If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.Collection: Way
Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.Collection: Long
Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.Collection: Life
To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.Collection: Mean
...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.Collection: Anxiety
The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.Collection: Men
A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselvesCollection: Meaning Of Life
Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.Collection: Government
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. Some have expressed the very opposite feeling--the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.Collection: Book
The death anxiety of many people is fueled ... by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential. Many people are in despair because their dreams didn't come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true. A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.Collection: Dream
Mature love is loving, not being loved.Collection: Love Is
Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offerCollection: Offers
One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Regret