Top 280 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “One of the first steps in therapy is to identify the here-and-now equivalents of your patient’s interpersonal problems. An essential part of your education is to learn to focus on the here-and-now. You must develop here-and-now rabbit ears.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

110. “Knowledge is limited, only stupidity is unlimited.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

111. “He was saying, fulfill yourself, realize your potential, live boldly and fully. Then, and only then, die without regret.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

112. “To summarize, the rationale for using the here-and-now is that human problems are largely relational and that an individual’s interpersonal problems will ultimately be manifested in the here-and-now of the therapy encounter.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

117. “Some people are wish-blocked, knowing neither what they feel nor what they want. Without opinions, without impulses, without inclinations, they become parasites on the desires of others.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said that if he had eight hours to cut down a tree, he’d spend several of these hours sharpening his ax.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

124. “One thing he resolved was not to make that one good year a bad year by grieving that it was not more than a year.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

125. “Lucretius’ maxim: ‘Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

128. “We need to go even further: the therapist must strive to create a new therapy for each patient.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

129. “Above all, the therapist must be prepared to go wherever the patient goes, do all that is necessary to continue building trust and safety in the relationship.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

130. “Each of us has a taste of death when slipping into sleep every night or when losing consciousness under anesthesia. Death and sleep, Thanatos and Hypnos in the Greek vocabulary, were twins. The Czech existential novelist Milan Kundera suggests that we also have a foretaste of death through the act of forgetting: “What terrifies most about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. In fact, the act of forgetting is a form of death always present within life.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

131. “Therapists must convey to the patient that their paramount task is to build a relationship together that will itself become the agent of change.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

132. “Nu experientele in sine, ci felul in care le interpretam determina calitatea vietii noastre.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

133. “What is immortal is this life, this moment. There is no afterlife, no goal toward which this life points, no apocalyptic tribunal or judgment. This moment exists forever, and you, alone, are your only audience.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

134. “Spinoza says that reason is no match for passion and what we must do is to turn reason into a passion.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

135. “Iata ce-am invatat despre cancer: iti arata ce inseamna o boala incurabila si apoi te azvarle inapoi in lume, in propria ta viata, cu toata placerea si dulceata ei, pe care le simti acum mai mult ca niciodata. Si stii ca ti s-a dat ceva si ti s-a luat ceva.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

136. “To my mind, personal psychotherapy is, by far, the most important part of psychotherapy training.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

137. “People like people who are interested in them.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

138. “To help someone, I believe you have to enter into that person’s world.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

139. “Parerga and Paralipomena offers lessons on how to think independently, how to retain skepticism and rationality, how to avoid soothing supernatural emollients, how to think well of ourselves, keep our stakes low, and avoid attaching ourselves to what can be lost.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

140. “Isi amintea, de asemenea, ca ramasese in bratele ei prea mult. Exact acesta fusese motivul pentru care o considerase periculoasa si se hotarase pe loc sa nu se mai intalneasca cu ea. Reprezenta o amenintare pentru libertatea lui. Ceea ce urmarise el fusese detensionarea sexuala rapida...”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

147. “If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation. Only.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

148. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

150. “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