Quotes from Irvin D. Yalom

If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.

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.

I always wanted to be a writer. Maybe, had I been brought up in another generation, I might have just gone into writing rather than medicine - which is not to say that I didn't also have a great attraction towards the idea of being a healer. Fortunately, I've been able to combine the two in ways I could never possibly have imagined.

I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called 'The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,' and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.

I think all kinds of meanings in life transcend your self. They're linked to other generations of people around us, to our children and our family. We're passing on something of ourselves to others. I feel that's what makes our life full of meaning.

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.

I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.

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

Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.

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