Quotes by Irvin D. Yalom

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

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 ones germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

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

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

The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street.

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

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.

Credinta, oricat de pasionata, de pura, de arzatoare, nu spune absolut nimic despre realitatea existentei lui Dumnezeu

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.

Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind—or, as this Freud says, the unconscious—that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.

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

Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become. ... Im sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality. ... He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it--that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion. p.269

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. Thats when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no ones 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?

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

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, isnt that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?

I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don’t want to be “just another patient”. I wanted to be “special”. I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn’t forget. I’d exist then. (Marge’s letter to Yalom)

That just seems to be the way we’re built.

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.

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

Upon learning that her cancer had spread to her spine, Paula prepared her thirteen year-old son for her death by writing him a letter of farewell that moved me to years. In her final paragraph she reminded him that the lungs in the human fetus do not breathe, nor do its eyes see. Thus, the embryo is being prepared for an existence it cannot yet imagine