Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.

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

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

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.

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.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown. This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.

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.

Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

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