Top 100 Irvin Yalom Quotes
#2. Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
Irvin D. Yalom
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
Irvin D. Yalom
#6. To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
Irvin D. Yalom
#7. 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
#8. And what is the most terrible thing about boredom? Why do we rush to dispel it? Because it is a distraction-free state which soon enough reveals underlying unpalatable truths about existence - our insignificance, our meaningless existence, our inexorable progression to deterioration and death.
Irvin D. Yalom
#9. 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
#10. If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
Irvin D. Yalom
#11. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
Irvin D. Yalom
#12. 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
#13. Thought training and behavior shaping! These methods are not for the human realm! Ach, we're not animal trainers!" "Yes,
Irvin D. Yalom
#14. If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
Irvin D. Yalom
#15. The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
Irvin D. Yalom
#16. 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
#17. Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!
Irvin D. Yalom
#18. It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.
Irvin D. Yalom
#19. The more the therapist is able to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing, the less need there is for the therapist to embrace orthodoxy.
Irvin D. Yalom
#20. What have your scholarly investigations shown you?" No
Irvin D. Yalom
#21. Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated.
Irvin D. Yalom
#22. Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
Irvin D. Yalom
#23. I have others who rob me of my solitude, and yet do not truly offer me company.
Irvin D. Yalom
#24. I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
Irvin D. Yalom
#25. I should have become an "I" before I became a "we".
Irvin D. Yalom
#26. Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
Irvin D. Yalom
#29. 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. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one's death anxiety. My
Irvin D. Yalom
#30. He was saying, fulfill yourself, realize your potential, live boldly and fully. Then, and only then, die without regret.
Irvin D. Yalom
#31. This world is supposed to have been made by a God? No, much better by a devil!
Irvin D. Yalom
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. For one can never really be helped by another; one must find the strength to help oneself.
Irvin D. Yalom
#36. We cannot avoid this responsibility, this freedom.
Irvin D. Yalom
#37. The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality; all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.
Irvin D. Yalom
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. But you, like me, have good eyes. You looked too far into life. You saw that it was futile to reach wrong goals and futile to set new wrong goals. Multiplications of zero are always zero!" Breuer
Irvin D. Yalom
#41. More than death, one fears the utter isolation that accompanies it. We try to go through life two by two, but each one of us must die alone- no one can die our death with us or for us. The shunning of the dying by the living prefigures final absolute abandonment
Irvin D. Yalom
#42. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
Irvin D. Yalom
#44. 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
#45. Every single person in the world is fundamentally alone. It's hard, but that's the way it is, and we have to face it.
Irvin D. Yalom
#46. 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
#47. Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful.
Irvin D. Yalom
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?
Irvin D. Yalom
#51. the flame of belief is fueled inexhaustibly by the fears of death, oblivion, and meaninglessness. Where
Irvin D. Yalom
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#58. Perhaps," said Nietzsche, "only by being a man does a man release the woman in woman.
Irvin D. Yalom
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else ...
Irvin D. Yalom
#62. Nonetheless, the past is part of your present consciousness - it forms the spectacles through which you experience the present.
Irvin D. Yalom
#63. I'm looking for me in you, that my hollowness makes it impossible to identify my needs and my desires,
Irvin D. Yalom
#64. 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
#65. The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.
Irvin D. Yalom
#66. 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
#67. One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
Irvin D. Yalom
#68. I remain convinced that a therapist's judicious self-disclosure facilitates the course of therapy. Love's
Irvin D. Yalom
#69. more commonly death anxiety surfaces in nightmares. A
Irvin D. Yalom
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. It's no great mystery. If no one will listen, it's only natural to shout!
Irvin D. Yalom
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
Irvin D. Yalom
#78. I'm listening. Sometimes I see better with closed eyes.
Irvin D. Yalom
#79. 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)
Irvin D. Yalom
#80. 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
#81. As a general rule, the less one's sense of life fulfillment, the greater one's death anxiety.
Irvin D. Yalom
#82. Each time a goal is attained, it merely breeds additional needs. Thus more scurrying, more seeking, ad infinitum.
Irvin D. Yalom
#83. I don't want to be idealized by a patient because of what I've written.
Irvin D. Yalom
#84. Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
Irvin D. Yalom
#85. I wonder if you can ever be at home anywhere, because home is not a place
it's a state of mind. Really being at home is feeling at home in your own skin ... Perhaps you have been searching for home in the wrong place all your life.
Irvin D. Yalom
#86. will that which is necessary and then to love that which is willed.
Irvin D. Yalom
#87. Do not mistake awkwardness for callousness. Remember, I am a solitary person, as I warned you. I'm not accustomed to easy and warm social exchange.
Irvin D. Yalom
#88. 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
#89. Look out the other's window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
Irvin D. Yalom
#90. Decision invariably involves renunciation: for every yes there must be a no, each decision eliminating or killing other options (the root of the word decide means "slay," as in homicide or suicide).
Irvin D. Yalom
#91. 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
#92. The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.
Irvin D. Yalom
#93. I have noted two particularly powerful and common methods of allaying fears about death, two beliefs, or delusions, that afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness; the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer.
Irvin D. Yalom
#94. 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
#95. Every act is not necessarily a message about the relationship.
Irvin D. Yalom
#97. 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
#98. One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.
Irvin D. Yalom
#99. 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
#100. 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
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