Irvin D. Yalom > Quotes

“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

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

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

“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

“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 dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.”
― 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

“... 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

“To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

“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

“...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

“I should have become an "I" before I became a "we".”
― Irvin 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

“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

“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 Yalom

“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

“It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“Mature love is loving, not being loved.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

“Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.”
― 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

“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.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

“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

“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

“To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you’ll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It’s to produce a creator.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

“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

“Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

“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?”
― Irvin Yalom, سپیده حبیب, Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy – A Therapist's Clinical Stories of Memorable Patients and Transformation

“To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy