Home > Author > Irvin D. Yalom
1 " 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
2 " 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! "
3 " The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices. "
4 " Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death. "
5 " The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street. "
― Irvin D. Yalom , The Schopenhauer Cure
6 " The unexamined life is not worth living. "
― Irvin D. Yalom , Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
7 " Every person must choose how much truth he can stand. "
8 " 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. "
9 " The flower replied: you fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming. "
― Irvin D. Yalom
10 " Credinta, oricat de pasionata, de pura, de arzatoare, nu spune absolut nimic despre realitatea existentei lui Dumnezeu "
― Irvin D. Yalom , Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy
11 " 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. "
12 " Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind—or, as this Freud says, the unconscious—that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer. "
― Irvin D. Yalom , The Spinoza Problem
13 " Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit. "
14 " Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude. "
15 " I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home? "
16 " I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don’t want to be “just another patient”. I wanted to be “special”. I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn’t forget. I’d exist then. (Marge’s letter to Yalom) "
17 " That just seems to be the way we’re built. "
18 " Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, these ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen. "
19 " More than death, one fears the utter isolation that accompanies it. We try to go through life two by two, but each one of us must die alone- no one can die our death with us or for us. The shunning of the dying by the living prefigures final absolute abandonment "
20 " Upon learning that her cancer had spread to her spine, Paula prepared her thirteen year-old son for her death by writing him a letter of farewell that moved me to years. In her final paragraph she reminded him that the lungs in the human fetus do not breathe, nor do it's eyes see. Thus, the embryo is being prepared for an existence it cannot yet imagine "
