373 Quotes by Irvin D. Yalom

But you, like me, have good eyes. You looked too far into life. You saw that it was futile to reach wrong goals and futile to set new wrong goals. Multiplications of zero are always zero!” Breuer.

She was a rigid training analyst in a rigid institute that valued interpretation as the singular effective action of the analyst. Of her thoughtful, dense, and carefully worded interpretations, I remember not a one. But her reaching out to me at that time, in that warm manner – that I cherish even now, almost sixty years later.

We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices. For they are just the failings of mankind to which we also belong and accordingly we have all the same failings buried within ourselves. We should not be indignant with others for these vices simply because they do not appear in us at the moment.

Your task is to accept yourself – not to find ways to gain my acceptance.

To fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation.

Nu experientele in sine, ci felul in care le interpretam determina calitatea vietii noastre.

Again, Nietzsche thumbed through his notes, and then read, “ ‘One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

Pass, then, through this little space of time in harmony with nature and end thy journey in contentment, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.

Should we not create – should we not become – before we reproduce? Our responsibility to life is to create the higher, not to reproduce the lower.