Irvin D. Yalom > Quotes

“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has eve 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

“Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch

“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

“Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.”
― 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

“Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“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

“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

“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

“Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“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

“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has even 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

“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

“The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.”
― Irvin D. Yalom

“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure

“من نیز با پیروی از فروید اغلب رؤیاپرداز را کوتوله ی فربه و سرحالی تصور می کنم که در دل جنگل دندریت ها و اکسون ها، زندگی خوبی برای خود دست و پا کرده است. روزها می خوابد ولی شب ها، با وزوز و همهمه ی سیناپس ها سر از نازبالشش برمی دارد، نوشابه ی عسلی اش را می نوشد و با تنبلی، رشته ی رؤیاهای میزبانش را درهم می تند... به قصه های مضحک پریان شبیه است. درست همان انسان انگاری رایج قرن نوزدهم. همان خطای متداول فروید در عینی نمایاندن ساختارهای انتزاعی ذهن و مبدل ساختنشان به جن و پری هایی مستقل و مختار. فقط کاش من هم باورش نداشتم! ”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy

“Sterven is echter de eenzaamste gebeurtenis van het leven. We worden er niet alleen door van anderen afgescheiden, maar daarnaast stelt het ons ook bloot aan een nog angstaanjagender vorm van eenzaamheid: het is een scheiding van de wereld zelf.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“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

“Obwohl uns die Physikalität des Todes zerstört, rettet uns die Idee des Todes.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, In die Sonnw schauen: wie man die Angstvor dem Tod ueberwindet