373 Quotes by Irvin D. Yalom

Who can comprehend my torment, my sleepless nights, my flirtation with suicide? After all, haven’t I everything one could wish: money, friends, family, a beautiful and charming wife, renown, respectability? Who will comfort me? Who refrain from asking the obvious question: “What more can you want?

The joy of being observed ran so deep that Breuer believed the real pain of old age, bereavement, outliving one's friends, was the absence of scrutiny - the horror of living an unobserved life.

As a general rule, the less one’s sense of life fulfillment, the greater one’s death anxiety.

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

He had never encountered a patient who did not secretly enjoy a microscopic examination of his life. And the greater the power of magnification, the more the patient enjoyed it. The joy of being observed ran so deep that Breuer believed the real pain of old age, bereavement, outliving one’s friends, was the absence of scrutiny—the horror of living an unobserved life.

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.

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

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.