Yalom Quotes

You know, I think everybody I've seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it's very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They're not really interested in the person, he doesn't relate to the person. All these things I've written so much about. That's why I've made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing them into our own preferred ideas and gestalts... ~ Irvin D. Yalom

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

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least until one's midlife crisis, to the belief that existence consists of an eternal, upward spiral of achievement, dependent on will alone.
This comforting illusion may be shattered by some urgent irreversible experience ... None more potently confronts us with finiteness and contingency than the imminence of our own death. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107) ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I should have become an "I" before I became a "we". ~ Irvin D. Yalom

The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertion or seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates or embeds. One becomes one's own parent or remains the eternal child. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience. Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

To fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Why, you may ask, take on this unpleasant, frightening subject? Why stare into the sun? Why not follow the advice of the venerable dean of American psychiatry, Adolph Meyer, who, a century ago, cautioned psychiatrists, 'Don't scratch where it doesn't itch'? Why grapple with the most terrible, the darkest and most unchangeable aspect of life? ... Death, however, DOES itch. It itches all the time; it is always with us, scratching at some inner door, whirring softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Ask yourself, 'Who are the secure ones, the comfortable, the eternally cheerful?' I'll tell you the answer: only those with dull vision-the common people and the children ~ Irvin D. Yalom

will that which is necessary and then to love that which is willed. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene, when they moved into honesty with the revelation that they were fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Sex as the vital antagonist to death - isn't the orgasm the primal spark of life? I know of many instances in which sexual feelings arise in order to neutralize fears of death. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Use of masturbation as a way of soothing yourself to ward off death anxiety so you can fall asleep. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

In France, you have 900 years of romantic love going back to the troubadours and minstrels that wrote stories of Lancelot and Guinevere. You have gallantry at the highest level. ~ Marilyn Yalom

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

I remain convinced that a therapist's judicious self-disclosure facilitates the course of therapy. Love's ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Sensuality is a bitch that nips at our heels! And how nicely this bitch knows how to beg for a piece of spirit when denied a piece of meat. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Breuer gestured towards the bouquets of fresh-cut flowers that lay before many graves. "In this land of the dead, THESE are the dead, and THOSE"
he pointed to an old untended and abandoned section of the cemetery
"those are the truly dead. No one now tends their graves because no one living has ever known them. THEY know what it means to be dead. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Each time a goal is attained, it merely breeds additional needs. Thus more scurrying, more seeking, ad infinitum. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

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

The last gift a parent can give to children is to teach them, through example, how to face death with equanimity. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

the flame of belief is fueled inexhaustibly by the fears of death, oblivion, and meaninglessness. Where ~ Irvin D. Yalom

One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Nietzsche claimed that a philosopher's system of thought always arises from his autobiography, and I believe that to be true for all therapists - in fact, for anyone who thinks about thought. At a conference approximately ~ Irvin D. Yalom

We live in a society where we don't want to commit to another person for life. We do at the moment that we marry, but less and less people marry. We marry later, we marry less. On some level of the unconscious, we know there is less of a chance that a marriage will be life-long. ~ Marilyn Yalom

It's the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals - my professional rosary. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Fame, for example, consists of the opinions of others and requires that we must live our life as others wish. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

We're passing on something of ourselves to others. I feel that's what makes our life full of meaning. It's hard to have meaning in a closet, encapsulated by nothing. I think you really have to expand yourself and your life and do what you can for other people. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive? My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable. Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Many a friendship or marriage has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for, one another, one person uses another as a shield against isolation. A ~ Irvin D. Yalom

One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

We're 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

At the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexistence. ~ 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

To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

All I can do in one session is to be real, to leap into the patient's life, to offer observations in the hope that he'll be able to open doors and explore some new parts of himself in his ongoing therapy. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

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, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home? ~ Irvin D. Yalom

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. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Hair and hole, horn and teeth - hedgehog, walrus, ape, Josef Breuer. He ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion. Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Reading these books. Oh, the endless labor of the intellectual - pouring all this knowledge into the brain through a three-millimeter aperture in the iris. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Why squander all that love on a phantasm when there seems too little love to go around on Earth as it is? Better ~ Irvin D. Yalom

What have your scholarly investigations shown you?" No ~ Irvin D. Yalom

The thoughts haunted him. He hated them: they robbed him of his peace; they were alien, neither possible nor desirable. Still, he welcomed them: the only alternative- banishing Bertha from his mind-seemed inconceivable. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Sometimes I simply remind patients that sooner or later they will have to relinquish the goal of having a better past. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

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. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Some people are wish-blocked, knowing neither what they feel nor what they want. Without opinions, without impulses, without inclinations, they become parasites on the desires of others. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Love obsession often serves as a distraction, keeping the individual's gaze from more painful thoughts. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

When you meet someone, you know all about him. On subsequent meetings, you blind yourself to your own wisdom ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars
always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

People need people - for initial and continued survival, for socialization, for the pursuit of satisfaction. No one - not the dying, not the outcast, not the mighty - transcends the need for human contact. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

One must learn to live with the living before one can learn to live with the dead. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Winnicott also cites the hostile lullabies mothers sing to babies, who fortunately do not understand the words. For example: Rockabye, Baby, on the treetop, When the wind blows the cradle will rock, When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, And down will come baby, cradle and all. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

The death anxiety of many people is fueled ... by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential. Many people are in despair because their dreams didn't come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true. A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

As Nietzsche said, "If we have our own 'why' of life, we shall get along with any 'how. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

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." ... "I'm 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 ~ Irvin D. Yalom

From both my personal and my professional experience, I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Schopenhauer and Spinoza distilled, condensed, and funneled through the pupil, along the optic nerve, and directly into our occipital lobes. I'd love to be able to eat with my eyes - I'm ~ Irvin D. Yalom

For one can never really be helped by another; one must find the strength to help oneself. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

A rabbi had a conversation with the Lord about Heaven and Hell. "I will show you Hell," said the Lord, and he led the rabbi into a room containing a large round table. The people sitting around the table were famished and desperate. In the middle of the table was an enormous pot of stew that smelled so delicious that the rabbi's mouth watered. Each person around the table held a spoon with a very long handle. Although the long spoons just reached the pot, their handles were longer than the would-be diners' arms: thus, unable to bring food to their lips, no one could eat. The rabbi saw that their suffering was terrible indeed.


"Now I will show you Heaven," said the Lord, and they went into another room, exactly the same as the first. There was the same large round table, the same pot of stew. The people were equipped with the same long-handled spoons - but here everyone was well nourished and plump, laughing and talking. The rabbi could not understand. "It is simple, but it requires a certain skill," said the Lord. "In this room, you see, they have learned to feed each other. ~ Irving Yalom

Sometimes I gaze so far into life that I suddenly look around and see that no one has accompanied me, and that my sole companion is time. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Some said living with cancer had made them wiser, more self-realized, while others had reordered their priorities in life, grown stronger, learned to say no to activities they no longer valued and yes to things that really mattered - such as loving their family and friends, observing the beauty about them, savoring the changing seasons. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

She attempted to deal with her terror in a most ineffective and magical mode-a mode that I have seen many patients use: she attempted to elude death by refusing to live. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Better, Josef, far better, to have the courage to change your convictions. Duty and faithfulness are shams, curtains to hide behind. Self-liberation means a sacred no, even to duty. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

If it weren't for errant passion, death, despair, and loss, the great bulk of art would never have been born. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I have no intention to get married because it would only cause me worries.
And why would that be the case?
I would be jealous, because my wife would cheat on me.
Why are you so sure of that?
Because I would deserve it.
Why is that?
Because I would have married. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Every single person in the world is fundamentally alone. It's hard, but that's the way it is, and we have to face it. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

born to avenge my sex and dominate yours ~ Marilyn Yalom

Existential isolation, a third given, refers to the unbridgeable gap between self and others, a gap that exists even in the presence of deeply gratifying interpersonal relationships. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

The prohibition on promoting a pawn to a queen while the original queen was still on the board was an attempt to preserve the uniqueness of the king's wife, his only permissible conjugal mate according to Christian doctrine. The Arabic game did not have to face that problem because a Muslim ruler could theoretically have as many viziers as he wanted. The idea of multiple queens on the chessboard proved so anxiety-making for Europeans that it remained a subject of contention for centuries to come. ~ Marilyn Yalom

He was persuaded of the reality and significance of human choice; he believed that experiential learning was a far more powerful approach to personal understanding and change than an endeavor resting upon intellectual understanding; he believed that individuals have within themselves an actualizing tendency, an inbuilt proclivity toward growth and fulfillment. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Exactly. We know that the great Goethe carried a copy of Spinoza's Ethics in his pocket for a year. Imagine that - an entire year! And not only Goethe but many other great Germans. Lessing and Heine reported a clarity and calmness that came from reading this book. Who knows, there may come a time in your life when you, too, will need the calmness and clarity that Spinoza's Ethics offers. I shan't ask you to read that book now. You're too young to grasp its meaning. But I want you to promise that before your twenty-first birthday you will read it. Or perhaps I should say, read it by the time you're fully grown. Do I have your word as a good German? ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97) ~ Irvin D. Yalom

The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality; all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

It's no great mystery. If no one will listen, it's only natural to shout! ~ Irvin D. Yalom

A curious thought experiment ... Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Four major existential concerns - death, meaning in life, isolation, and freedom - play a crucial role in the inner life of every human being and ~ Irvin D. Yalom

The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I submit that God has no wishes about how, or even if, we glorify Him. Allow me, then, Jacob, to love God in my own fashion. Franco's ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Mind thinks in images but, to communicate with another, must transform image into thought and then thought into language. That march, from image to thought to language, is treacherous. Casualties occur: the rich, fleecy texture of image, its extraordinary plasticity and flexibility, its private nostalgic emotional hues - all are lost when image is crammed into language. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Your task is to accept yourself - not to find ways to gain my acceptance. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

If we do not want to be a plaything in the hands of every rogue and the object of every fool's ridicule, the first rule is to be reserved and inaccessible. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Were you really, truly, helpful to your patients? Maybe you've just learned to pick patients who were going to improve on their own anyway. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Friendship matters, especially in old age, when death reduces the number of one's friends. ~ Marilyn Yalom

The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness - domains soaked in anxiety. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible. ~ Irvin D. Yalom