Quotes from 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.

I don't want to be idealized by a patient because of what I've written.

From the very early days of seeing patients, I noticed that many of them seemed to be concerned with issues of their mortality, and so the philosophy training I had taken began to seem rather important to me.

... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

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.

During my childhood, Washington was a segregated city, and I lived in the midst of a poor black neighborhood. Life on the streets was often perilous. Indoor reading was my refuge, and twice a week, I made the hazardous bicycle trek to the central library at Seventh and K streets to stock up on supplies.

I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed.

Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.

Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.

...the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.

I'm a compulsive reader of fiction. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. My wife Marilyn and I... our initial friendship began because we are both readers. I've gone to sleep almost every night of my life after having read in a novel for 30 or 40 minutes. I'm a great reader of fiction and much less so of non-fiction.

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

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

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.

When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.

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.

Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful.

The ultimate goal of therapy... it's too hard a question. The words come to me like tranquility, like fulfillment, like realizing your potential.

I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy - I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection.

To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.

Mature love is loving, not being loved.