Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.

Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.

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

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.

Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)

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.

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

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

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

Living safely is dangerous.

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.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

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?

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

I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion. Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.

If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.

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

When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

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

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

...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.

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

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.