Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

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.

The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

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!

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

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

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.

The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.

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.

If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.

If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.

When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.

Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)

Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other. We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.

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

If I'm among men who don't agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself. A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively. Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it's absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

...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.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you "Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?" - Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn't. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

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)

Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

Mature love is loving, not being loved.

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

One thing I feel clear about is that it's important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven't really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won't look back upon my forties with regret.

What? 'Borderline patients play games'? That what you said? Ernest, you'll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can't treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

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.

To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.

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.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

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.

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.

Living safely is dangerous.

Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.

Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer

If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!

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

Were 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.