373 Quotes by Irvin D. Yalom

Lucretius’ maxim: ‘Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.

Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work.

To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you’ll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It’s to produce a creator.

One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.

It’s not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas – it’s always the relationship.

Husserl – he’s one of the greats. His term noema refers to the thing as we experience it, the thing as structured by us.

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.

Knowledge is limited, only stupidity is unlimited.

The monuments, the ideas left behind by beings like me are my greatest pleasure in life. Without books I would long ago have been in despair.