Quotes by Irvin D. Yalom

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

“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.”

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

“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...”

“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”

“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 o...”

“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 conf...”

“I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I dont want to be just another patient. I wanted to be special. I want to be something, anythin...”

“That just seems to be the way were 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 c...”

“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...”

“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 ...”

“I hate it that she has so insinuated herself into the interstices of my mind that I can never root her out. And most of all, I hate that at the end of my life I feel compelled to ask, "How'd I do, ...”

“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...”

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