Quote

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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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
Domain
Territory
Leads
Anxiety
Path
Decision
Finiteness
May
Domains
Hard
Soaked

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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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.
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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.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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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.
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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.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect
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It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
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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
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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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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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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
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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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.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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