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. YalomRead
The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
Interpretation
Pain cannot be easily avoided; it tends to manifest in different ways regardless of our attempts to suppress it.
This quote by Irvin D. Yalom highlights the inevitability of pain in life. When we try to shut out or ignore our suffering, it often resurfaces in unexpected forms or places, suggesting that rather than evading pain, we should confront and understand it to truly heal and grow.
In practice
During a mental health seminar, to discuss the importance of facing one's emotions.
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.
Mary's life was a perfect imitation of Jesus. She was humble, hidden, sorrowful and afflicted, but she also knew joys that never entered the heart of man. She is all things to all men that she might understand their failings, though she failed not.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe
Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
'Zone One' has one kind of an apocalypse, and 'The Underground Railroad' another. In both cases, the narrators are animated by a hope in a better place of refuge - in the last surviving human outpost, Up North. Does it exist? They can only believe.
Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.
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