Top 30 Best Yalom Quotes
#2. 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
#3. Friendship matters, especially in old age, when death reduces the number of one's friends.
Marilyn Yalom
#4. What has been given is a new perspective on living life, and what has been taken away is the illusion of limitless life and the belief in a personal specialness exempting us from natural law.
Irvin D. Yalom
#5. The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.
Irvin D. Yalom
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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.
Irvin D. Yalom
#9. 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. Perhaps," said Nietzsche, "only by being a man does a man release the woman in woman.
Irvin D. Yalom
#12. If we hope for more significant therapeutic change, we must encourage our patients to assume responsibility - that is, to apprehend how they themselves contribute to their distress.
Irvin D. Yalom
#13. 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
#14. The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else ...
Irvin D. Yalom
#15. Nonetheless, the past is part of your present consciousness - it forms the spectacles through which you experience the present.
Irvin D. Yalom
#16. 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
#17. I'm looking for me in you, that my hollowness makes it impossible to identify my needs and my desires,
Irvin D. Yalom
#18. 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
#19. Our history suggests that women will continue to show the world how to be friends.
Marilyn Yalom
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
Irvin D. Yalom
#23. I remain convinced that a therapist's judicious self-disclosure facilitates the course of therapy. Love's
Irvin D. Yalom
#24. more commonly death anxiety surfaces in nightmares. A
Irvin D. Yalom
#25. 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
#26. Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene, when they moved into honesty with the revelation that they were fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human.
Irvin D. Yalom
#28. It's no great mystery. If no one will listen, it's only natural to shout!
Irvin D. Yalom
#29. 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
#30. Schopenhauer and Spinoza distilled, condensed, and funneled through the pupil, along the optic nerve, and directly into our occipital lobes. I'd love to be able to eat with my eyes - I'm
Irvin D. Yalom
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