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

Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

To help someone, I believe you have to enter into that person’s world.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

I dare to hope that education will get a much-needed facelift, incorporating not only therapeutic practices to help children with their emotional development, but also letting them run around and scrape their knees and get into all sorts of trouble.

— Irvin D. Yalom

Not exactly a certified philosopher – my degree is in engineering and architecture, but my true home was philosophy, and even at the Polytechnic I found some learned professors who guided my private readings.

— Irvin D. Yalom

Seen from the standpoint of youth, life is an endlessly long future; from that of old age it resembles a very brief past.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

So Kant’s discovery was that, rather than experience the world as it’s really out there, we experience our own personalized processed version of what’s out there. Such properties as space, time, quantity, causality are in us, not out there – we impose them on reality. But, then, what is pure, unprocessed reality? What’s really out there, that raw entity before we process it? That will always remain unknowable to us, said Kant.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

Children deprived of a maternal love bond fail to develop the basic trust necessary to love themselves, to believe that others will love them, or to love being alive. In adulthood they become estranged, withdraw into themselves, and often live in an adversarial relationship with others.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

Death is the extinguishing of consciousness.

— Irvin D. Yalom

All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral – both memory and the object of memory.

— Irvin D. Yalom

Parerga and Paralipomena offers lessons on how to think independently, how to retain skepticism and rationality, how to avoid soothing supernatural emollients, how to think well of ourselves, keep our stakes low, and avoid attaching ourselves to what can be lost.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

People like people who are interested in them.

— Irvin D. Yalom

The ancient philosopher who said “Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not” was Lucretius, expounding upon Epicurus.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

My work is to live before I die.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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
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