― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch
“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?”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
“If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“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!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“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)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch
“... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
“Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure
“I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“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
“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.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure
“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, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
“To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
“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. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“If Epicurus were speaking to you at this moment, he would urge you to simplify life. Here's how he might put it if he were standing here today : " Lads,your needs are few, they are easily attained, and any necessary suffering can be easily tolerated. Don't complicate your life with such trivial goals as riches and fame: they are the enemy of ATARAXIA. Fame,for example,consist of the opinions of
others and requires that we must live our life as other wish. To achieve and maintain fame, we must like what others like and shun whatever it is that they shun. Hence, a life of fame or a life in politics? Flee from it. And wealth? Avoid it! It is a trap. The more we acquire the more we crave, and the deeper our sadness when our yearning is not satisfied. Lads, listen to me: If you crave happiness, do not waste your life struggling for that which you really do not need.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem
“Mature love is loving, not being loved.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
“I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
“The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else...”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
“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, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
“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
“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.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“...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, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
“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, The Spinoza Problem
“Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure
“To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
“Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“love obsession often serves as a distraction, keeping the individual’s gaze from more painful thoughts.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients
“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, The Spinoza Problem
“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”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure
“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)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch
“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.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem
“I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“Four givens are particularly relevant for psycho-therapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
“The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
“To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
“Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients
“Παρόλο που η ψευδαίσθηση συχνά αναπτερώνει και ανακουφίζει, στο τέλος πάντα αδυνατίζει και περιορίζει την ψυχή.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
“İnsanlar vedalaşırken genellikle olayın sürekliliğini inkar eden sözler dile getirmeyi severler. Birbirlerinden ayrılırken ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, yani tekrar görüşene kadar, derler. Yeni bir araya gelme planları yapmakta çok aceleci davranırlar, ama bunu unutmakta daha acelecidirler. Ben bu tür insanlardan değilim. Gerçeği söylemeyi tercih ederim ki gerçek de büyük bir ihtimalle bir daha karşılaşmayacak olduğumuzdur.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“I often feel caught in a dilemma: on the one hand I wish to be more natural with you and yet, on the other hand, because I feel that you’re easily wounded and that you give my comments inordinate power, I feel I must consider my wording very, very carefully.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients
“Indeed, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for the profession. Though the public may believe that therapists guide patients systematically and sure-handedly through predictable stages of therapy to a foreknown goal, such is rarely the case: instead, as these stories bear witness, therapists frequently wobble, improvise, and grope for direction. The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy. This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner
“The thoughts haunted him. He hated them: they robbed him of his peace; they were alien, neither possible nor desirable. Still, he welcomed them: the only alternative- banishing Bertha from his mind-seemed inconceivable.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“Some people are wish-blocked, knowing neither what they feel nor what they want. Without opinions, without impulses, without inclinations, they become parasites on the desires of others.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
“ So the highest and the happiest of endeavors is to be a philosopher ? Doesn't it seem self-serving for a philosopher to make that claim?”
― Irvin D. Yalom
“How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?”
― Irvin D. Yalom
“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.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
“It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. Next, Darwin showed us that we were not central in the chain of life but, like all other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house-that much of our behavior is governed by forced outside of our consciousness. There is no doubt that Freud’s unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud’s birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forced and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure
“Dom nije mjesto - to je stanje svijesti.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem
“As long as he denies his own agency, real change is unlikely because his attention will be directed toward changing his environment rather than himself.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients
“come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner
“Obwohl uns die Physikalität des Todes zerstört, rettet uns die Idee des Todes.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, In die Sonne schauen: Wie man die Angst vor dem Tod überwindet
“Tanrıyı öldürürseniz, onun tapınağına sığınmaktan da vazgeçmek, orayı terk etmek zorundasınız!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“insanın bütün eylemleri kendisine yöneliktir, bütün hizmetleri kendine hizmettir, bütün sevgisi kendini sevmesindendir.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
“The establishment of an authentic relationship with patients, by its very nature, demands that we forego the power of the triumvirate of magic, mystery, and authority.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients
“Why, you may ask, take on this unpleasant, frightening subject? Why stare into the sun? Why not follow the advice of the venerable dean of American psychiatry, Adolph Meyer, who, a century ago, cautioned psychiatrists, 'Don't scratch where it doesn't itch'? Why grapple with the most terrible, the darkest and most unchangeable aspect of life? ... Death, however, DOES itch. It itches all the time; it is always with us, scratching at some inner door, whirring softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
“Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients