Top 280 Irvin D. Yalom Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

253. “I’ve always regarded therapy more as a calling than a profession, a way of life for people who care about others.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

254. “A heavy silence descended.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

255. “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

256. “I always say toward the end of the hour: “Let’s take a minute to look at how you and I are doing today.” Or, “Any feelings about the way we are working and relating?” Or, “Before we stop, shall we take a look at what’s going on in this space between us?” Or if I perceive difficulties, I might say something like: “Before we stop, let’s check into our relationship today. You’ve talked.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

257. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

259. “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

260. “Death is the extinguishing of consciousness.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

261. “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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

263. “Indeed, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for the profession.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

264. “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

265. “One who does not feel is not sought out by others, but exists in a state of loneliness, cut off not only from one’s feelings but from those of others.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

266. “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

267. “The wish-blocked individual has enormous social difficulties. Others, too, wish to shout at such persons. They have no opinions, no inclinations, no desires of their own. They become parasitic on the wishes of others, and finally others become bored, drained, or fatigued at having to supply wish and imagination for them.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

268. “Hard to think of others when you’re feeling trapped, feeling you’re spinning in a vicious circle.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

269. “Now I can read and get a good night’s rest which is what I really wanted all along.” In that remarkable phrase-“which is what I really wanted all along”-lies the crux of Bernard’s problem. The obvious question is, “Why, Bernard, if this is what you really want, did you not simply do that directly?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

270. “How shall we live? How to face our mortality? How to live with the knowledge that we are simply life forms, thrown into an indifferent universe, with no preordained purpose?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

271. “If, as Kundera says, death’s terror stems from the idea of the past vanishing, then reexperiencing the past is vital reassurance. Transiency is stayed – if only for a while.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

272. “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

273. “How do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never tasted it?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

274. “Analiza regretlor duce mereu discutia intr-o zona mai profunda.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

275. “I only meant that a feeling is merely a feeling. A subjective state can never substantiate an objective truth.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

276. “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

277. “Penny’s fear of her own death, while not explicitly emerging in our therapy, manifested itself indirectly. For example, she was greatly concerned about “time running out” – too little time left to get an education, to take a vacation, to leave behind some tangible legacy; and too little time for us to finish our work together.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

278. “There is something comforting about a stone marked, presumably for eternity, with the name of your loved one. I.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

279. “Better, Josef, far better, to have the courage to change your convictions. Duty and faithfulness are shams, curtains to hide behind. Self-liberation means a sacred no, even to duty.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

280. “Psychiatric cure is the “expanding of the self to such final effect that the patient as known to himself is much the same person as the patient behaving to others.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

281. “We need art, Nietzsche said, lest we perish from the truth.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

282. “Better for me, much better, if you had been direct, if you had sent some message from your heart to mine. Nothing monumental, maybe just some simple inquiry into my situation or state of mind, or, Christ, you might have simply said, ‘I’m sorry to hear you’re dying.’ How hard would that have been?”

— Irvin D. Yalom

283. “Do not pander, patronize, scheme, or strategize,” his instincts told him. “Simply go about your business in your usual professional manner.” “But.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

284. “Irv, of course you’re upset by the review. Thank God for it! If you weren’t so sensitive, you wouldn’t be such a good writer.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

285. “In unele zile, cand merg pe Kirstentsrasse si vad douazeci, treizeci de curve aliniate, sunt foarte tentat. Niciuna nu este mai draguta ca Rachel, multe au gonoree si sifilis, si totusi sunt tentat. Daca as sti sigur ca nu m-ar recunoaste nimeni, cine stie? Poate! Toti ne saturam sa mancam acelasi lucru. Stii, Josef, pentru fiecare femeie frumoasa exista cate un biet barbat care a obosit s-o mai reguleze.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

286. “A few weeks ago, he had invited a young physician friend, Sigmund Freud, to accompany him for an entire day. A mistake perhaps! The young man had been attempting to decide on his choice of medical specialty, and that day may have frightened him away from the practice of general internal medicine. For, according to Freud’s calculations, Breuer had spent six hours in his fiacre!”

— Irvin D. Yalom

287. “I admire how you avoid superficiality – how willing you are to share your thoughts so honestly and unself-consciously.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

288. “But surely,” Breuer.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

289. “Sometimes death anxiety is dismissed as trivial in its universality. Who, after all, does not know and fear death? Yet it is one thing to know about death in general, to grit one’s own teeth and stoke up a shudder or two; it is quite another to apprehend one’s own death and to experience it in the bones and sockets of one’s being. Such death awareness is a terror that comes rarely, sometimes only once or twice in a lifetime-a terror that Marvin now experienced night after night.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

290. “People fear contact with the afflicted because they wish not to be confronted with the death that awaits each of them.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

291. “What have your scholarly investigations shown you?” No.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

292. “In choosing to enter fully into each patient’s life, I, the therapist, not only am exposed to the same existential issues as are my patients but must be prepared to examine them with the same rules of inquiry. I must assume that knowing is better than not knowing, venturing than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

293. “It is far preferable to employ terms like “distanced,” “shut out,” or “disconnected”; they give voice to your wish to be closer, more connected, and more engaged, and it is difficult for our clients to take umbrage at that.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

294. “Third, after each meeting I dictated and mailed to the members a weekly summary which was not only a narrative of the content of each session but also self-revealing. I described my experience in the group – my puzzlement, my pleasure with certain of my contributions, my chagrin at errors I had made, or issues I had overlooked, or members I felt I had neglected.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

295. “Mass consumerism requires that a product be attractive, well packaged, and, most important of all, easily and quickly consumed. Unfortunately these requirements are generally incompatible with the effort and the thoughtfulness that are needed if one is truly to examine and alter one’s life and world perspective.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

296. “His visitor must have sensed her misstep, Breuer thought, noticing how she rushed to continue her narrative.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

297. “It was she who taught me that embracing death honestly permits one to experience life in a richer, more satisfying manner.”

— Irvin D. Yalom