Top 280 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “In general, e mai bine sa nu ataci un mecanism de aparare, decat daca acesta creeaza mai multe probleme decat solutii si daca ai ceva mai bun de pus in loc.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

202. “Ar trebui sa punem o limita dorintelor noastre, sa ne infranam poftele si sa ne stapanim furia, intotdeauna avand in minte faptul ca individul poate dobandi doar o parte infinit de mica din acele lucruri care merita posedate...”

— Irvin D. Yalom

203. “Life cannot be lived nor can death be faced without anxiety. Anxiety is guide as well as enemy and can point the way to authentic existence. The task of the therapist is to reduce anxiety to comfortable levels and then to use this existing anxiety to increase a patient’s awareness and vitality.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

204. “The monuments, the ideas left behind by beings like me are my greatest pleasure in life. Without books I would long ago have been in despair.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

205. “Self-exploration is a lifelong process, and I recommend that therapy be as deep and prolonged as possible – and that the therapist enter therapy at many different stages of life.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

206. “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

207. “Excessive attachment either to material goods, to other individuals, or even attachment to the concept of ‘I’ is the major source of human suffering. And doesn’t it follow that such suffering can be ameliorated by avoiding the attachment?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

211. “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

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

— 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. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— 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 enemies of conformity are, of course, freedom and self awareness.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

226. “Everything, every fact, bar none, has a cause, and we must understand that everything necessarily occurs.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

227. “Children deprived of a maternal love bond fail to develop the basic trust necessary to love themselves, to believe that others will love them, or to love being alive. In adulthood they become estranged, withdraw into themselves, and often live in an adversarial relationship with others.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

232. “I try always to keep in mind that we are all sentenced to an existence filled with inescapable misery – an existence which none of us would choose if we knew the facts ahead of time. In that sense we are all, as Schopenhauer put it, fellow sufferers, and we stand in need of tolerance and love from our neighbors in life.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

233. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

237. “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

238. “My work is to live before I die.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

244. “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

245. “I often urge patients to project themselves into the future and to consider how they can live now so that five years hence they will be able to look back upon life without regret sweeping over them anew.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

246. “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

247. “Sometimes I gaze so far into life that I suddenly look around and see that no one has accompanied me, and that my sole companion is time.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

248. “Julius rode the crest of a robust protest vote. In addition, to his great surprise, he immediately was embraced vigorously by virtually all the Jewish students, about 30 percent of the student body, who had heretofore kept a low, apolitical profile. They loved him, the love of the timid, hesitant, make-no-waves Mason-Dixon Yid for the gutsy, brash New York Jew.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

249. “Each individual has a different internal world and the stimulus has a different meaning to each.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

250. “Do I in any way profit from this misery?” Nietzsche finally responded. “I have reflected on that very question for many years. Perhaps I do profit. In two ways. You suggest that the attacks are caused by stress, but sometimes the opposite is true – that the attacks dissipate stress. My work is stressful. It requires me to face the dark side of existence, and the migraine attack, awful as it is, may be a cleansing convulsion that permits me to continue.”

— Irvin D. Yalom