Irvin Yalom Quotes

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.

...the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.

I should have become an "I" before I became a "we".

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

Mature love is loving, not being loved.

Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.

It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.

Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love. 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.

Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time.

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.

One thing I feel clear about is that it's important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven't really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won't look back upon my forties with regret.

The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else...

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I'm still learning.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.

Four givens are particularly relevant for psycho-therapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.

Time cannot be broken; that is our greatest burden. And our greatest challenge is to live in spite of that burden.

What? 'Borderline patients play games'? That what you said? Ernest, you'll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can't treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)

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

I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.

Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.

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.

I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.

The flower replied: You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

Ask yourself, 'Who are the secure ones, the comfortable, the eternally cheerful?' I'll tell you the answer: only those with dull vision-the common people and the children

I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?

More in love with desire than with the desired!

You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.

To fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation.

love obsession often serves as a distraction, keeping the individual’s gaze from more painful thoughts.

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.

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.

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves

I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy—I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love’s executioner.

Some people are wish-blocked, knowing neither what they feel nor what they want. Without opinions, without impulses, without inclinations, they become parasites on the desires of others.

Sometimes I simply remind patients that sooner or later they will have to relinquish the goal of having a better past.

As long as he denies his own agency, real change is unlikely because his attention will be directed toward changing his environment rather than himself.

He who would be everything cannot be anything.”)

Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other. We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated.

Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends.   You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? —Thus Spake Zarathustra

How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?

Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.

To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.

A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.

The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertion or seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates or embeds. One becomes one’s own parent or remains the eternal child.

eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever.

Again, Nietzsche thumbed through his notes, and then read, “ ‘One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.

A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted. The

The obsession is a distraction; it protects you from thinking about something else,

As Nietzsche said, “If we have our own ‘why’ of life, we shall get along with any ‘how.

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.

He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

The flower replied: you fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you "Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?" - Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn't. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety.

The establishment of an authentic relationship with patients, by its very nature, demands that we forego the power of the triumvirate of magic, mystery, and authority.

As a general rule, the less one’s sense of life fulfillment, the greater one’s death anxiety.

And what is the most terrible thing about boredom? Why do we rush to dispel it? Because it is a distraction-free state which soon enough reveals underlying unpalatable truths about existence—our insignificance, our meaningless existence, our inexorable progression to deterioration and death.

every single person in the world is fundamentally alone. It’s hard, but that’s the way it is, and we have to face it.

The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.

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

We should cherish things because they are true, not because they are old.

reading these books. Oh, the endless labor of the intellectual—pouring all this knowledge into the brain through a three-millimeter aperture in the iris.

if we hope for more significant therapeutic change, we must encourage our patients to assume responsibility—that is, to apprehend how they themselves contribute to their distress.

It’s no great mystery. If no one will listen, it’s only natural to shout!

If you make a mistake, admit it. Any attempt at cover-up will ultimately backfire. At some level the patient will sense you are acting in bad faith, and therapy will suffer. Furthermore, an open admission of error is good model-setting for patients and another sign that they matter to you.

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

If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect

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.

Four major existential concerns—death, meaning in life, isolation, and freedom—play a crucial role in the inner life of every human being and

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said that if he had eight hours to cut down a tree, he’d spend several of these hours sharpening his ax.

Whether I will live a long time or a short time, I’m alive now, at this moment. What I want is to know that there are other things to hope for besides length of life. What I want to know is that it isn’t necessary to turn away from thoughts of suffering or death but neither is it necessary to give these thoughts too much time and space. What I want is to be intimate with the knowledge that life is temporary. And then, in the light (or shadow) of that knowledge, to know how to live. How to live now.

More than death, one fears the utter isolation that accompanies it. We try to go through life two by two, but each one of us must die alone- no one can die our death with us or for us. The shunning of the dying by the living prefigures final absolute abandonment

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.

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.

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.

Indeed, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for the profession. Though the public may believe that therapists guide patients systematically and sure-handedly through predictable stages of therapy to a foreknown goal, such is rarely the case: instead, as these stories bear witness, therapists frequently wobble, improvise, and grope for direction. The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy. This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. 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.

Why, you may ask, take on this unpleasant, frightening subject? Why stare into the sun? Why not follow the advice of the venerable dean of American psychiatry, Adolph Meyer, who, a century ago, cautioned psychiatrists, 'Don't scratch where it doesn't itch'? Why grapple with the most terrible, the darkest and most unchangeable aspect of life? ... Death, however, DOES itch. It itches all the time; it is always with us, scratching at some inner door, whirring softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.

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.

It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. Next, Darwin showed us that we were not central in the chain of life but, like all other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house-that much of our behavior is governed by forced outside of our consciousness. There is no doubt that Freud’s unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud’s birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forced and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities.

Misanthropist’s manifesto: Do not tell a friend what your enemy ought not to know. Giving way neither to love nor hate is one half of world wisdom: to say nothing and believe nothing, is the other half. Distrust is the mother of safety. To forget at any time the bad traits of a man’s character is like throwing away hard-earned money. Better to let men be what they are than to take them for what they are not. By being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and obliging: hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, these ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.