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.
Irvin D. YalomDeath anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
Irvin D. YalomThe act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
Irvin D. YalomSome 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?
Irvin D. Yalom