When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

by Irvin D. Yalom

impertinent

brashly

I cannot minister to a mind diseased.”

unpretentiousness.

irreverent

pre-Socratic Greeks,

Agonis—the belief that one develops one’s natural gifts only through contest—and

Malwida von Meysenbug’s

we are free-thinking idealists who reject socially imposed restrictions. We believe in our capability to create our own moral structure.”

odious

blithely

neuralgia,

He had never encountered a patient who did not secretly enjoy a microscopic examination of his life. And the greater the power of magnification, the more the patient enjoyed it. The joy of being observed ran so deep that Breuer believed the real pain of old age, bereavement, outliving one’s friends, was the absence of scrutiny—the horror of living an unobserved life.

scotomata,

ameliorated

Surely, you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.”

‘Become who you are.’ And

Hope is the final evil!”

Freud was right: there had to be a reservoir of complex thoughts in the brain, beyond consciousness but on alert, ready at any time to be mustered and marched onto the stage of conscious thinking.

little unconscious homunculus living

It’s the courage to be myself that is the important thing.

‘Whatever does not kill me, makes me stronger.’

The psyche does not function as a single entity. Parts of our mind may operate independently of others.

there are independent walled-off mental kingdoms within our mind?”

Perhaps the conscious mental representations are afterthoughts—ideas thought after the deed to provide us with the illusion of power and control.

Loneliness is a breeding ground for sickness.”

Dissect your motives deeper! You will find that no one has ever done anything wholly for others. All actions are self-directed, all service is self-serving, all love self-loving.”

You love desire, not the desired.

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness.

we no longer know how to live without our religious mythologies.

out of disbelief one can create a code of behavior for man, a new morality, a new enlightenment, to replace one born out of superstition and the lust for the supernatural.”

Whatsoever does not kill him, he claims, makes him stronger.

primum non nocere—do

For one can never really be helped by another; one must find the strength to help oneself.

fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars—always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight.

who does not obey himself is ruled by others. It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.”

If you kill God, you must also leave the shelter of the temple.”

You must now learn to acknowledge your life and to have the courage to say, ‘Thus I chose it!’ The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices!”

‘One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’

Often I feel disoriented: the old goals don’t work any more, and I’ve lost the knack of inventing new ones. When I think about the flow of my life, I feel betrayed or tricked, as though a celestial joke has been played on me, as though I’ve danced my life away to the wrong tune.”

philosophic cure consists of learning to listen to your own inner voice.

“Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.”

“Become yourself,

we are ruled not by God’s desire, but by time’s desire.

One forgives one’s friends with more difficulty than one’s enemies.

there is a gulf—a huge gulf—between knowing something intellectually and knowing it emotionally.

“The stage director of my mind,”

All seeing is relative, and so is all knowing. We invent what we experience. And what we have invented, we can destroy.”

Time cannot be broken; that is our greatest burden. And our greatest challenge is to live in spite of that burden.”

we are more in love with desire than with the desired!”