373 Quotes by Irvin D. Yalom

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in – the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.

Nonetheless, the past is part of your present consciousness – it forms the spectacles through which you experience the present.

Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene, when they moved into honesty with the revelation that they were fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human.

Mind thinks in images but, to communicate with another, must transform image into thought and then thought into language. That march, from image to thought to language, is treacherous. Casualties occur: the rich, fleecy texture of image, its extraordinary plasticity and flexibility, its private nostalgic emotional hues – all are lost when image is crammed into language.

All I can do in one session is to be real, to leap into the patient’s life, to offer observations in the hope that he’ll be able to open doors and explore some new parts of himself in his ongoing therapy.

Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

Life can be compared to a piece of embroidered material of which, every-one in the first half of his time, comes to see the top side, but in the second half, the reverse side. The latter is not so beautiful but it is more instructive because it enables one to see how the threads are connected together.

The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.