Top 280 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

165. “The most common secret is a deep conviction of basic inadequacy – a feeling that one is basically incompetent, that one bluffs one’s way through life. Next in frequency is a deep sense of interpersonal alienation – that, despite appearances, one really does not, or cannot care for or love another person. The third most frequent category is some variety of sexual secret.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

166. “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

167. “Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can’t bear the chill of reality. And don’t exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you’re no match for it. The thirst for religion is too strong, its roots too deep, its cultural reinforcement too powerful.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

168. “Sterven is echter de eenzaamste gebeurtenis van het leven. We worden er niet alleen door van anderen afgescheiden, maar daarnaast stelt het ons ook bloot aan een nog angstaanjagender vorm van eenzaamheid: het is een scheiding van de wereld zelf.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

169. “When you meet someone, you know all about him. On subsequent meetings, you blind yourself to your own wisdom.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

170. “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

171. “They are part of the slave mentality artfully engineered by priestly propaganda. 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

172. “Confruntarea cu moartea iminenta poate sa propulseze omul in intelepciune si la o noua profunzime a existentei.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

173. “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

174. “You say that imperishable happiness lies elsewhere. Tell me about this ‘elsewhere.’” “I only know that it does not lie in perishable objects. It lies not outside but within. It is the mind that determines what is fearful, worthless, desirable, or priceless, and therefore it is the mind, and only the mind, that must be altered.” “What.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

175. “Your task is to accept yourself – not to find ways to gain my acceptance.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

176. “Absolutely, bring any kind of carrot cake you wish.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

177. “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

178. “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

179. “Partea intunecata a admiratiei este invidia combinata cu nemultumirea fata de modestia propriei conditii.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

180. “He was persuaded of the reality and significance of human choice; he believed that experiential learning was a far more powerful approach to personal understanding and change than an endeavor resting upon intellectual understanding; he believed that individuals have within themselves an actualizing tendency, an inbuilt proclivity toward growth and fulfillment.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

181. “Freedom means that one is responsible for one’s own choices, actions, one’s own life situation. Though.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

182. “My friend,” he whispered, “I cannot tell you how to live differently because, if I did, you would still be living another’s design.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

183. “Oamenii ii plac pe cei carora le pasa de ei.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

184. “But you, like me, have good eyes. You looked too far into life. You saw that it was futile to reach wrong goals and futile to set new wrong goals. Multiplications of zero are always zero!” Breuer.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

185. “No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

186. “People say strange, incoherent things in such a state.” “Her words do not strike me as incoherent or random. You suggested, Doctor Breuer, that I should simply interject any comments that occur to me. Let me make an observation: I find it remarkable that you are responsible for all of your thoughts and all of your deeds, whereas she” – Nietzsche’s voice was stern, and he shook his finger at Breuer – “she, by virtue of her illness, is exonerated from everything.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

187. “Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes over flow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

188. “Nonetheless, the past is part of your present consciousness – it forms the spectacles through which you experience the present.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

189. “That was the first important discovery I made about Betty: she was desperately isolated, and she survived this isolation only by virtue of the sustaining myth that her intimate life was being lived elsewhere. Her friends, her circle of acquaintances, were not here, but elsewhere, in New York, in Texas, in the past. In fact, everything of importance was elsewhere. It was at this time that I first began to suspect that for Betty there was no “here” there.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

190. “Were you really, truly, helpful to your patients? Maybe you’ve just learned to pick patients who were going to improve on their own anyway.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

191. “Fame, for example, consists of the opinions of others and requires that we must live our life as others wish.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

192. “Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind – or, as this Freud says, the unconscious – that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

193. “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. Though.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

194. “The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

195. “What has been given is a new perspective on living life, and what has been taken away is the illusion of limitless life and the belief in a personal specialness exempting us from natural law.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

196. “Yes, Bento had one weak spot, and Simon had discovered it. Bento was in love with books – not only the reading of books but the possession of them.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

197. “In the first, a tornado approached and I led her and others up a fire escape that ultimately dead-ended against a brick wall. In the second dream she and I were taking an examination and neither of us knew the answers. I welcomed these dreams because they informed the patient of my limits, my humanness, my having to grapple with the same fundamental problems of life that she did.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

198. “From both my personal and my professional experience, I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

199. “My point is that every course of therapy consists of small and large spontaneously generated responses or techniques that are impossible to program in advance. Of course, technique has a different meaning for the novice than for the expert. One needs technique in learning to play the piano but eventually, if one is to make music, one must transcend learned technique and trust one’s spontaneous moves.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

200. “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