Top 280 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 6

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

52. “The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

53. “I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort. I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

54. “Members of a cohesive group feel warmth and comfort in the group and a sense of belongingness; they value the group and feel in turn that they are valued, accepted, and supported by other members.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

55. “The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness – domains soaked in anxiety.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

56. “Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!”

— Irvin D. Yalom

57. “I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

58. “But those things aren’t you. They are just things about you, not the real, the core you. Look at the center of you. What do you want to change there?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

59. “Sometimes I simply remind patients that sooner or later they will have to relinquish the goal of having a better past.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

60. “Death and life are interdependent: though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

61. “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 D. Yalom

62. “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, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

64. “A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

65. “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

66. “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

67. “I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy – I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love’s executioner.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

68. “Don’t argue: you will lose, and even if you win, you lose.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

69. “A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

70. “I’m not ready for a committed relationship with anyone and that I have a ton of work to do on myself.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

71. “It’s not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas – it’s always the relationship.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

72. “The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertion or seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates or embeds. One becomes one’s own parent or remains the eternal child.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

73. “We should cherish things because they are true, not because they are old.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

74. “More in love with desire than with the desired!”

— Irvin D. Yalom

75. “To fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

76. “Again, Nietzsche thumbed through his notes, and then read, “ ‘One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

77. “When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

78. “How disquieting to realise that reality is an illusion, at best a democratisation of perception based on participant consensus.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

79. “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

80. “Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

81. “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

82. “Some said living with cancer had made them wiser, more self-realized, while others had reordered their priorities in life, grown stronger, learned to say no to activities they no longer valued and yes to things that really mattered – such as loving their family and friends, observing the beauty about them, savoring the changing seasons.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

83. “As a general rule, the less one’s sense of life fulfillment, the greater one’s death anxiety.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

85. “As Nietzsche said, “If we have our own ‘why’ of life, we shall get along with any ’how.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

86. “Some cannot loosen their own chains yet can nonetheless liberate their friends. – Nietzsche.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

87. “People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted. The.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

88. “Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

89. “Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene, when they moved into honesty with the revelation that they were fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

90. “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

91. “If you make a mistake, admit it. Any attempt at cover-up will ultimately backfire. At some level the patient will sense you are acting in bad faith, and therapy will suffer. Furthermore, an open admission of error is good model-setting for patients and another sign that they matter to you.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

92. “It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

93. “Many a friendship or marriage has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for, one another, one person uses another as a shield against isolation. A.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

94. “A nightmare is a failed dream, a dream that, by not “handling” anxiety, has failed in its role as the guardian of sleep.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

96. “Friendship between therapist and patients is a necessary condition in the process of therapy – necessary, but not, however, sufficient. Psychotherapy is not a substitute for life but a dress rehearsal for life, In other words, though psychotherapy requires a close relationship, the relationship is not an end – it is a means to an end.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

97. “Life can be compared to a piece of embroidered material of which, every-one in the first half of his time, comes to see the top side, but in the second half, the reverse side. The latter is not so beautiful but it is more instructive because it enables one to see how the threads are connected together.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

98. “Ask yourself, ‘Who are the secure ones, the comfortable, the eternally cheerful?’ I’ll tell you the answer: only those with dull vision-the common people and the children.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

99. “It’s no great mystery. If no one will listen, it’s only natural to shout!”

— Irvin D. Yalom

100. “Beginning therapists must learn that there are times to sit in silence, sometimes in silent communion, sometimes simply while waiting for patients’ thoughts to appear in a form that they may be expressed.”

— Irvin D. Yalom