2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Irwin Yalom is a professor at Stanford University, one of the founders of existential psychotherapy (the direction of modern depth psychology) and one of the most famous psychologists in the modern world.
And Yalom is also an excellent writer, author of about a dozen smart and exciting books that reveal to the reader the kitchen of a practicing psychologist.
We have prepared some interesting excerpts from books and interviews by Irwin Yalom. Of course, they are about love and loneliness, life and death, the meaning of our existence in general.
"I have found the key to solving life: firstly, to desire what is necessary, and secondly, to love what is desired."
In our time, no one dies from bitter truths - the choice of antidotes is too great
"The best truths are bloody truths torn out of their own life experience."
“I dream of a love in which two people share a passion for the joint search for the highest truth. Maybe it shouldn't be called love. Maybe it's called friendship."
"Loneliness does not in any way depend on the presence or absence of people around."
“Hope is the biggest evil! It prolongs the agony."
“Marriage is sacred. But … it's better to ruin a marriage than to let it ruin yourself!"
“Despair is the price that a person must pay for self-knowledge. Look into the very depths of life - and you will see despair there."
“Do not beget children until you become true creators and do not beget creators. It is wrong to give birth to children under the influence of a need, it is wrong to use children in order to fill your loneliness, it is wrong to give meaning to your life, producing another copy of yourself …"
“When I meet someone I like, I start thinking about how difficult it will be to part with him.”
"You should never take anything from a person if you have nothing to offer him in return."
"A tree needs storms to grow tall and proud."
The more a person has within himself, the less he expects from the rest
“Love is often confused with lust or obsession. But these are different feelings, and they must be distinguished from each other. I wrote about this in the book "Cure for Love". Such an obsessed lover sees not a real person in front of him, but one who will satisfy his needs. For example, it will save him from the fear of death or become a means to combat loneliness. This kind of attraction can be very strong, but it cannot last long. It only wants to take and does not know how to give, it is closed on itself and feeds on itself and therefore is doomed to self-destruction. While love is a special relationship between people, there is no compulsion in it, but a lot of warmth and desire to bestow upon another, to take care of him."
“We have learned one lesson very well: life cannot be postponed, it must be lived now, without waiting for the weekend, vacation, the time when the children graduate from college or when you retire. How many times have I heard sorrowful exclamations: "What a pity that I had to wait until cancer takes over my body in order to learn to live."
What we have often begins to have us
"A man must carry chaos and fury within himself in order to give birth to a dancing star."
“There are two types of loneliness: everyday, when there is no one to say a word, and existential, it is also called isolation. In this second sense, a person is doomed to be lonely. No matter how close we are with a husband or wife, we still have to die one by one. Sometimes, trying to escape from isolation, we rush into a relationship, trying to merge with a partner tightly, losing self-awareness, so as not to feel our separateness, isolation. But that doesn't help. You can get involved in another person only by meeting your own loneliness."
"… a person is afraid of death the more, the less he really lives his life and the more his unrealized potential."
“People who feel emptiness are never healed by connecting with another incomplete, incomplete person. On the contrary, two birds with broken wings, united, make a very awkward flight. No amount of patience can help them fly; and in the end they must part and heal separately."
"The meaning of life is like climbing a tightrope that we ourselves threw into the air."
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