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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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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
Territory
Leads
Anxiety
Path
Decision
Finiteness
May
Domains
Hard
Soaked
Domain

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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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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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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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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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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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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)
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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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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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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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.
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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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