Top 100 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
#1. To fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation.
Irvin D. Yalom
#2. I'm not ready for a committed relationship with anyone and that I have a ton of work to do on myself.
Irvin D. Yalom
#4. I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?
Irvin D. Yalom
#5. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#6. To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you'll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It's to produce a creator.
Irvin D. Yalom
#7. She attempted to deal with her terror in a most ineffective and magical mode-a mode that I have seen many patients use: she attempted to elude death by refusing to live.
Irvin D. Yalom
#8. The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else ...
Irvin D. Yalom
#9. Ask yourself, 'Who are the secure ones, the comfortable, the eternally cheerful?' I'll tell you the answer: only those with dull vision-the common people and the children
Irvin D. Yalom
#10. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#11. Sex as the vital antagonist to death - isn't the orgasm the primal spark of life? I know of many instances in which sexual feelings arise in order to neutralize fears of death.
Irvin D. Yalom
#12. A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.
Irvin D. Yalom
#13. 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
Irvin D. Yalom
#14. their breasts swelling into powerful, magical globes - when he was overcome by an extraordinary craving to merge with their bodies, to suckle at their nipples, to slip into their warmth and wetness.
Irvin D. Yalom
#15. Every act is not necessarily a message about the relationship.
Irvin D. Yalom
#16. As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
Irvin D. Yalom
#17. The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.
Irvin D. Yalom
#18. It's not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas - it's always the relationship.
Irvin D. Yalom
#19. The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertion or seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates or embeds. One becomes one's own parent or remains the eternal child.
Irvin D. Yalom
#20. will that which is necessary and then to love that which is willed.
Irvin D. Yalom
#21. As a general rule, the less one's sense of life fulfillment, the greater one's death anxiety.
Irvin D. Yalom
#22. Many a friendship or marriage has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for, one another, one person uses another as a shield against isolation. A
Irvin D. Yalom
#23. Look out the other's window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
Irvin D. Yalom
#24. I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
Irvin D. Yalom
#25. Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!
Irvin D. Yalom
#26. I've always regarded therapy more as a calling than a profession, a way of life for people who care about others.
Irvin D. Yalom
#27. If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
Irvin D. Yalom
#28. Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns
fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns
seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
Irvin D. Yalom
#29. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
Irvin D. Yalom
#30. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#31. Were you really, truly, helpful to your patients? Maybe you've just learned to pick patients who were going to improve on their own anyway.
Irvin D. Yalom
#32. To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
Irvin D. Yalom
#33. I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
Irvin D. Yalom
#34. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#35. 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?
Irvin D. Yalom
#36. the flame of belief is fueled inexhaustibly by the fears of death, oblivion, and meaninglessness. Where
Irvin D. Yalom
#37. How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?
Irvin D. Yalom
#38. Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in
the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
Irvin D. Yalom
#39. As long as he denies his own agency, real change is unlikely because his attention will be directed toward changing his environment rather than himself.
Irvin D. Yalom
#40. All I can do in one session is to be real, to leap into the patient's life, to offer observations in the hope that he'll be able to open doors and explore some new parts of himself in his ongoing therapy.
Irvin D. Yalom
#41. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
Irvin D. Yalom
#43. 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
#44. You wonder about a conversation with nothing concealed - its real name is hell, I believe. To disclose oneself to another is the prelude to betrayal, and betrayal makes one sick, does it not?
Irvin D. Yalom
#45. For one can never really be helped by another; one must find the strength to help oneself.
Irvin D. Yalom
#46. 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
Irvin D. Yalom
#47. Come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one's death anxiety.
Irvin D. Yalom
#48. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#49. He was saying, fulfill yourself, realize your potential, live boldly and fully. Then, and only then, die without regret.
Irvin D. Yalom
#50. It's the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals - my professional rosary.
Irvin D. Yalom
#51. Better, Josef, far better, to have the courage to change your convictions. Duty and faithfulness are shams, curtains to hide behind. Self-liberation means a sacred no, even to duty.
Irvin D. Yalom
#52. Therapy uncovered deep roots of these everyday problems - roots stretching down to the bedrock of existence. I
Irvin D. Yalom
#53. Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
Irvin D. Yalom
#54. Four major existential concerns - death, meaning in life, isolation, and freedom - play a crucial role in the inner life of every human being and
Irvin D. Yalom
#55. Right, that's exactly what I mean by your being both the prisoner and the jailer.
Irvin D. Yalom
#56. 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
#57. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#58. 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?
Irvin D. Yalom
#59. 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
#60. 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
Irvin D. Yalom
#61. His visitor must have sensed her misstep, Breuer thought, noticing how she rushed to continue her narrative.
Irvin D. Yalom
#62. Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? - Thus Spake Zarathustra
Irvin D. Yalom
#63. When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
Irvin D. Yalom
#64. Hair and hole, horn and teeth - hedgehog, walrus, ape, Josef Breuer. He
Irvin D. Yalom
#65. Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.
Irvin D. Yalom
#66. Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
Irvin D. Yalom
#67. From both my personal and my professional experience, I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully.
Irvin D. Yalom
#68. People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted. The
Irvin D. Yalom
#69. One thing he resolved was not to make that one good year a bad year by grieving that it was not more than
Irvin D. Yalom
#70. If we relate to people believing that we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nuture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcends category. The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable.
Irvin D. Yalom
#71. Sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
Irvin D. Yalom
#72. Dissect your motives deeper! You will find that no one has ever done anything wholly for others. All actions are self-directed, all service is self-serving, all love self-loving.
Irvin D. Yalom
#73. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#74. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#75. The thoughts haunted him. He hated them: they robbed him of his peace; they were alien, neither possible nor desirable. Still, he welcomed them: the only alternative- banishing Bertha from his mind-seemed inconceivable.
Irvin D. Yalom
#76. One doesn't do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
Irvin D. Yalom
#77. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#78. Hope is the worst of evils because it protracts torment." "Your
Irvin D. Yalom
#79. The flower replied: You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.
Irvin D. Yalom
#80. A nightmare is a failed dream, a dream that, by not "handling" anxiety, has failed in its role as the guardian of sleep.
Irvin D. Yalom
#81. 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
#82. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#84. You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
Irvin D. Yalom
#85. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#86. At the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexistence.
Irvin D. Yalom
#87. I dream of a love in which two people share a passion to search together for some higher truth. Perhaps I should not call it love. Perhaps it's real name is friendship.
Irvin D. Yalom
#88. As Nietzsche said, "If we have our own 'why' of life, we shall get along with any 'how.
Irvin D. Yalom
#91. Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work.
Irvin D. Yalom
#92. When you meet someone, you know all about him. On subsequent meetings, you blind yourself to your own wisdom
Irvin D. Yalom
#93. Reading these books. Oh, the endless labor of the intellectual - pouring all this knowledge into the brain through a three-millimeter aperture in the iris.
Irvin D. Yalom
#94. I often feel caught in a dilemma: on the one hand I wish to be more natural with you and yet, on the other hand, because I feel that you're easily wounded and that you give my comments inordinate power, I feel I must consider my wording very, very carefully.
Irvin D. Yalom
#95. would you be willing to live this past year again and again for all eternity?
Irvin D. Yalom
#96. Time cannot be broken; that is our greatest burden. And our greatest challenge is to live in spite of that burden.
Irvin D. Yalom
#97. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#98. Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.
Irvin D. Yalom
#99. Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing them into our own preferred ideas and gestalts...
Irvin D. Yalom
#100. I don't let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that's offering the patient comfort. I never want to take away something when I don't have anything better to offer him in a way.
Irvin D. Yalom
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