Top 280 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 6

51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

61. “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

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. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

78. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

85. “Mourning is the price we pay for having the courage to love others.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

86. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

89. “Each time a goal is attained, it merely breeds additional needs. Thus more scurrying, more seeking, ad infinitum.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices. For they are just the failings of mankind to which we also belong and accordingly we have all the same failings buried within ourselves. We should not be indignant with others for these vices simply because they do not appear in us at the moment.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

100. “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