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)

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

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

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

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 by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

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

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

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.

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

Mature love is loving, not being loved.

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer

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

If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect

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

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

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

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.

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

What? 'Borderline patients play games'? That what you said? Ernest, you'll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can't treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)

Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)

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 old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?