Top 180 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Am invatat in munca mea, ca se tem cel mai mult de moarte cei care se apropie de ea avand prea multa viata netraita in ei. Cel mai bine este sa ne folosim toata viata. Sa nu-i lasam mortii decat drojdiile, nimic altceva decat un castel ars pana in temelii.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

103. “Husserl – he’s one of the greats. His term noema refers to the thing as we experience it, the thing as structured by us.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

104. “Creating yourself is a source of great pride, but it also leads to a feeling of having no foundations. I’ve known many gifted children of immigrants who have a sense of being lilies growing in a swamp – beautiful flowers but no deep roots.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

105. “He is civilized, polite, a man of manners. He has tamed his wild nature, turned his wolf into a spaniel. And he calls this moderation. Its real name is mediocrity!”

— Irvin D. Yalom

106. “You wonder about a conversation with nothing concealed – its real name is hell, I believe. To disclose oneself to another is the prelude to betrayal, and betrayal makes one sick, does it not?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

107. “At the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexistence.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

108. “If we do not want to be a plaything in the hands of every rogue and the object of every fool’s ridicule, the first rule is to be reserved and inaccessible.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

110. “No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

111. “This world is supposed to have been made by a God? No, much better by a devil!”

— Irvin D. Yalom

112. “To live in despair because life is finite or because life has no higher purpose or embedded design is crass ingratitude.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

114. “One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

115. “When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

116. “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

117. “The last gift a parent can give to children is to teach them, through example, how to face death with equanimity.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

118. “Trebuie sa ai in tine haos si frenezie pentru a da nastere unei stele care danseaza.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

119. “Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter. In.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

120. “There is no human deed or thought that lies fully outside the experience of other people.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

121. “I have noted two particularly powerful and common methods of allaying fears about death, two beliefs, or delusions, that afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness; the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

122. “Perhaps,” said Nietzsche, “only by being a man does a man release the woman in woman.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

123. “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

124. “All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral – both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

125. “Like you, I have often wondered why fears reign at night. After twenty years of such wondering, I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars – always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight. “And.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

126. “We humans appear to be meaning-seeking creatures who have had the misfortune of being thrown into a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life and to perform the tricky maneuver of denying our personal authorship of this meaning. Thus we conclude instead that it was “out there” waiting for us. Our ongoing search for substantial meaning systems often throws us into crises of meaning.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

127. “Should we not create – should we not become – before we reproduce? Our responsibility to life is to create the higher, not to reproduce the lower.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

128. “Someone’s got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

129. “The more the therapist is able to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing, the less need there is for the therapist to embrace orthodoxy.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

130. “Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

131. “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

132. “The therapist’s worldview is in itself isolating. Seasoned therapists view relationships differently, they sometimes lose patience with social ritual and bureaucracy, they cannot abide the fleeting shallow encounters and small talk of many social gatherings.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

133. “The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality; all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

134. “At other times Betty expressed anger at my forcing her to think about morbid topics. “Why think about death? We can’t do anything about it!” I tried to help her understand that, though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us. In other words, our awareness of death can throw a different perspective on life and incite us to rearrange our priorities.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

135. “My work is to love my body, all of it. Whole and entire. The whole aging mortal troublesome failing miraculous intricate breathing doomed cancerous warm mortifying unreliable hard-working imperfect beautiful appalling living struggling tender frightened frightening living dying living breathing temporary wondrous mystifying afflicted mortally-ill assemblage of the atoms of the universe that is my self, is me, for this space of time.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

136. “Fiecare alegere presupune o renuntare, si fiecare renuntare ne face constienti de limitare si temporalitate.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

137. “I often feel caught in a dilemma: on the one hand I wish to be more natural with you and yet, on the other hand, because I feel that you’re easily wounded and that you give my comments inordinate power, I feel I must consider my wording very, very carefully.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

138. “She was a rigid training analyst in a rigid institute that valued interpretation as the singular effective action of the analyst. Of her thoughtful, dense, and carefully worded interpretations, I remember not a one. But her reaching out to me at that time, in that warm manner – that I cherish even now, almost sixty years later.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

139. “Too often, we therapists neglect our personal relationships. Our work becomes our life.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

140. “Myrna. Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information from me, but you’re not giving anything back! I believe you’re trying to relate to me differently now but I’m not experiencing it as engagement. I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person – it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

141. “Just as the bones, flesh, intestines and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes the sight of man endurable, so the agitations and passions of the soul are enveloped in vanity; it is the skin of the soul.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

142. “The same point is made by the Hasidic Rabbi, Susya, who shortly before his death said, “When I get to heaven they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ Instead they will ask ‘Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could become?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

143. “Pass, then, through this little space of time in harmony with nature and end thy journey in contentment, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

144. “All I can do in one session is to be real, to leap into the patient’s life, to offer observations in the hope that he’ll be able to open doors and explore some new parts of himself in his ongoing therapy.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

145. “It’s often pretty hard to speak to others about my cancer. I have a number of pet peeves. Many folks are overly solicitous. They can’t do enough for you. There’s that Kaiser nurse who keeps asking “Isn’t there someone who can drive you here?” And some people are too prying. I think they are voyeuristic and attempt to satisfy their morbid curiosity about having cancer. I don’t like that and have sometimes wanted to say, “Go get your own damn fatal illness.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

146. “A great many of our patients have conflicts in the realm of intimacy, and obtain help in therapy sheerly through experiencing an intimate relationship with the therapist. Some fear intimacy because they believe there is something basically unacceptable about them, something repugnant and unforgivable, Given this, the act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

147. “Mind thinks in images but, to communicate with another, must transform image into thought and then thought into language. That march, from image to thought to language, is treacherous. Casualties occur: the rich, fleecy texture of image, its extraordinary plasticity and flexibility, its private nostalgic emotional hues – all are lost when image is crammed into language.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

148. “The sentiment that one “should have done something more” reflects, it seems to me, an underlying wish to control the uncontrollable. After all, if one is guilty about not having done something that one should have done, then it follows that there is something that could have been done – a comforting thought that decoys us from our pathetic helplessness in the face of death.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

149. “I submit that God has no wishes about how, or even if, we glorify Him. Allow me, then, Jacob, to love God in my own fashion.” Franco’s.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

150. “That just seems to be the way we’re built.”

— Irvin D. Yalom