Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to pro...

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.

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

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

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

Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular r...

Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him the...

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. ...

You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignora...

The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been fo...

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dign...

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But i...

I hate it that she has so insinuated herself into the interstices of my mind that I can never root h...

I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from thei...

Credinta, oricat de pasionata, de pura, de arzatoare, nu spune absolut nimic despre realitatea exist...

Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really...

Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least un...

Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

We're not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with...

I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy - I, too, crave e...

I'm a compulsive reader of fiction. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. My wife Marily...

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

Dying, however, is lonely, the loneliest event of life. Dying not only separates you from others but...

Upon learning that her cancer had spread to her spine, Paula prepared her thirteen year-old son for ...

More than death, one fears the utter isolation that accompanies it. We try to go through life two by...

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

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

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ...

I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and...

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when...

I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life...

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