Top 280 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Nietzsche claimed that a philosopher’s system of thought always arises from his autobiography, and I believe that to be true for all therapists – in fact, for anyone who thinks about thought. At a conference approximately.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

203. “While there is no solution to existential isolation, therapists must discourage false solutions. One’s efforts to escape isolation can sabotage one’s relationships with other people. 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.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

206. “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

207. “All serious thinkers contemplate suicide,” Nietzsche noted. “It’s a comfort that helps us get through the night.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

208. “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

209. “After all, isn’t that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

210. “All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral – both memory and the object of memory.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

211. “I knew this was an important issue, and that we would return to it. Otto Rank described this life stance with a wonderful phrase: “Refusing the loan of life in order to avoid the debt of death.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

212. “If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

213. “By keeping death in mind, one passes into a state of gratitude, of appreciation for the countless givens of existence. This is what the Stoics meant when they said, “Contemplate death if you would learn how to live.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

214. “Whoever seeks peace and quiet should avoid women, the permanent source of trouble and dispute.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

215. “So Kant’s discovery was that, rather than experience the world as it’s really out there, we experience our own personalized processed version of what’s out there. Such properties as space, time, quantity, causality are in us, not out there – we impose them on reality. But, then, what is pure, unprocessed reality? What’s really out there, that raw entity before we process it? That will always remain unknowable to us, said Kant.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

216. “Omul fiind in totalitate parte a naturii, este incorect sa credem ca omul mai degraba tulbura, decat sa respecte ordinea naturii.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

217. “In fact, the effective therapist should never try to force discussion of any content area: Therapy should not be theory-driven but relationship-driven.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

218. “The joy of being observed ran so deep that Breuer believed the real pain of old age, bereavement, outliving one’s friends, was the absence of scrutiny – the horror of living an unobserved life.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

219. “It is extraordinarily difficult to know really what the other feels; far too often we project our own feelings onto the other.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

220. “Heidegger spoke of two modes of existence: the everyday mode and the ontological mode. In the everyday mode we are consumed with and distracted by material surroundings – we are filled with wonderment about how things are in the world. In the ontological mode we are focused on being per se – that is, we are filled with wonderment that things are in the world.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

221. “Who can comprehend my torment, my sleepless nights, my flirtation with suicide? After all, haven’t I everything one could wish: money, friends, family, a beautiful and charming wife, renown, respectability? Who will comfort me? Who refrain from asking the obvious question: “What more can you want?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

222. “Seen from the standpoint of youth, life is an endlessly long future; from that of old age it resembles a very brief past.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

223. “Amamos mais o desejo do que o ser desejado.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

224. “If parents teach the child that all free impulse expression is undesirable and all counter will is bad, the child suffers two consequences: suppression of his or her entire emotional life, and stunted, guilt-laden will. The child then grows into an adult who suppresses his or her emotions and regards the very act of willing as evil and forbidden.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

225. “The ancient philosopher who said “Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not” was Lucretius, expounding upon Epicurus.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

226. “Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not.’” “Is that any different from ‘When you’re dead, you’re dead’?” “A big difference. In death there is no ‘you.’ ‘You’ and ‘dead’ cannot coexist.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

227. “The enemies of conformity are, of course, freedom and self awareness.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

228. “Depresia este un efect secundar al mortii.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

229. “I dare to hope that education will get a much-needed facelift, incorporating not only therapeutic practices to help children with their emotional development, but also letting them run around and scrape their knees and get into all sorts of trouble.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

230. “Take advantage of opportunities to learn from patients. Make a point of inquiring often into the patient’s view of what is helpful about the therapy process.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

231. “Great literature survives, as Freud pointed out in his discussion of Oedipus Rex,18 because something in the reader leaps out to embrace its truth. The truth of fictional characters moves us because it is our own truth.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

232. “I believe there is no better way to learn about a psychotherapy approach than to enter into it as a patient.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

233. “Not exactly a certified philosopher – my degree is in engineering and architecture, but my true home was philosophy, and even at the Polytechnic I found some learned professors who guided my private readings.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

234. “A heavy silence descended.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

235. “Being empathic is so much a part of everyday discourse – popular singers warble platitudes about being in the other’s skin, walking in the other’s moccasins – that we tend to forget the complexity of the process. It is extraordinarily difficult to know really what the other feels; far too often we project our own feelings onto the other.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

236. “But then I think of the old story back at Johns Hopkins of the patients who would come in for years and almost every week the chart would say-patient better, patient better – and then at the end of several years, one sees that there really has been no change.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

237. “Can it be that I have escaped neither my past nor my mother?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

238. “Each person fears death in his or her own way. For some people, death anxiety is the background music of life, and any activity evokes the thought that a particular moment will never come again. Even an old movie feels poignant to those who cannot stop thinking that all the actors are now only dust.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

239. “And beware of empty compliments – make your support as incisive as your feedback or interpretations.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

240. “Am invatat demult ca atunci cand intre doua persoane este un lucru grav si nu vorbesc despre el, nu vorbesc nici despre altceva important.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

241. “Death is the extinguishing of consciousness.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

242. “Remember, you can’t do all the work. Be content to help a patient realize what must be done and then trust his or her own desire for growth and change.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

243. “Everyone needs to believe that there are truly wise men and women out there. I sought out such when younger, and now I, elderly and prominent, have become the suitable vessel for others’ wishes. I believe that our need for mentors reflects much about our vulnerability and wish for a superior or supreme being.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

244. “Let me adapt some of Nietzsche’s words and say this to you: “To become wise, you must learn to listen to the wild dogs barking in your cellar.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

245. “Heightened sexuality is a common response to confrontation with death.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

246. “Significant problems arise in relationships for the alexithymic individual. Others never know how that person feels; he or she seems unspontaneous, wooden, heavy, lifeless, and boring.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

247. “The patient has only one therapist while the therapist has many patients.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

248. “I was able to make her own dynamics crystal clear to her by quoting Otto Rank, one of Freud’s colleagues, who said, “Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death.” This dynamic is not uncommon. I think most of us have known individuals who numb themselves and avoid entering life with gusto because of the dread of losing too much.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

249. “People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

250. “Emotion has the power to obscure and falsify knowledge: that the whole world assumes a smiling aspect when we have reason to rejoice, and a dark and gloomy one when sorrow weighs upon us.”

— Irvin D. Yalom