Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

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
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
I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.

Irvin D. Yalom
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.

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

Irvin D. Yalom
Look out the other's window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.

Irvin D. Yalom
Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door. Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness. Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.

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

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

Irvin D. Yalom
He hated the sight of his beard…. He hated also the outcropping of gray that had insidiously appeared in his mustache, on the left side of his chin, and in his sideburns. These gray bristles were, he knew, the advance scouts of a relentless, wintry invasion. And there would be no stopping the march of the hours, the days, the years.

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

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

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

Irvin D. Yalom
One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control--to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic. The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient's control over every interaction.

Irvin D. Yalom
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
Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.

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

Irvin D. Yalom
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

Irvin D. Yalom
Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.

Irvin D. Yalom
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
What an existential approach is about is positing that our bad feelings, our dysphoria, our despair, our anxiety emanates not only from our own life history and all the traumas we may have had in the past, and not only from the figures that we have introjected — many of these figures being unloving, or uncaring, or neurotic on their own parts — and emanates not only from our current life crises, but it emanates also, also, from our confrontation with the existential facts of life, with our confrontation with the human condition.

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

Irvin D. Yalom
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
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