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

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

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

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
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