Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns – fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns – seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.

— Irvin D. Yalom

Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world. And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.

— Irvin D. Yalom

If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.

— Irvin D. Yalom

Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.

— Irvin D. Yalom

None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future. Some have expressed the very opposite feeling – the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

— Irvin D. Yalom

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in – the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.

— Irvin D. Yalom

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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.

— Irvin D. Yalom

If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!

— Irvin D. Yalom

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

Existentialism

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

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

— Irvin D. Yalom

I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort. I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.

— Irvin D. Yalom

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