Irvin D. Yalom - Anxiety Quotes

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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

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

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

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

Irvin D. Yalom