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

Irvin D. Yalom

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Irvin D. Yalom
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 13
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
University Teacher
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Irvin David Yalom
Enough
Tragic
Height
Cease
Tragedy
Reach
High
Ceases
Look
Climb
Looks
Climbs

More quotes by Irvin D. Yalom

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Live your life to the fullest and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.
Irvin D. Yalom
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
Irvin D. Yalom
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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.
Irvin D. Yalom
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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 ourselves
Irvin D. Yalom
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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.
Irvin D. Yalom
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
Irvin D. Yalom
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
Irvin D. Yalom
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
Irvin D. Yalom
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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
Irvin D. Yalom
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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
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
Irvin D. Yalom
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
Irvin D. Yalom
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
Irvin D. Yalom
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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. Some have expressed the very opposite feeling--the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
Irvin D. Yalom
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I'm still learning.
Irvin D. Yalom
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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. And if you do the latter, you're not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
Irvin D. Yalom
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
Irvin D. Yalom
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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
Irvin D. Yalom
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
Irvin D. Yalom
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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
Irvin D. Yalom