Top 280 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 6

101. “I dream of a love in which two people share a passion to search together for some higher truth. Perhaps I should not call it love. Perhaps it’s real name is friendship.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

111. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

115. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

120. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

129. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

131. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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