Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better.

As a physician, I would never encroach upon the religious freedoms of my patients.

The physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face - and make sense of - their own existence.

I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient.

Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.

I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.

When you go through a long illness, certainly one of cancer, there's a certain release from it and relief that it has come to an end, because the suffering can be unbearable, as opposed to an abrupt stop to life when they go out the door and there's a loved one who never comes home because of some accident.

Around-the-clock support is crucial for children receiving palliative care. They and their families often need help every hour of every day, both in hospices and at home.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

Shortly after her feeding tube is removed, Terri Schiavo receives the Catholic ceremony of last rites. Michael Schiavo stays in a room down the hall. He remains at his wife's side throughout the day, except when her immediate family comes to see Terri.

I've helped people get rid of headaches by placing my hand on their forehead, and backaches by placing my hand on their back. It's a powerful example of love that really works.

I'm open to all religions. Respecting Scientology is just like respecting any other religious view.

I have learned that delivering the best possible palliative care to children is vital, providing children and their families with a place of support, care and enhancement at a time of great need is simply life-changing.

I think health care is more about love than about most other things. If there isn't at the core of this two human beings who have agreed to be in a relationship where one is trying to help relieve the suffering of another, which is love, you can't get to the right answer here.

Does the imam have a legal right to build the mosque at Ground Zero? The answer is yes. But is it the right thing to do? The answer is no. And most Americans, and most moderate Muslims, join with me in that call.

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone.

It would be a great advance if Christian nations should put a stop to the exportation of spirituous liquors to the heathen races of the world.

We should at least make sure that patients are given the opportunity to opt out of spending their final days in a hospital, hooked up to tubes and running up enormous bills.

There was tremendous pressure to take dialysis, and there were lots of tears when I broke the news to the family that I was not going to do it.

I am a physician. I keep a drug-shop of lies. I give relief, consolation. Can one console and relieve without lying? ... Only women and doctors know how necessary and how helpful lies are to men.

When we, doctors, ask patients what their priorities are if time is short, what we do is we use what is available to us - whether it's geriatric care or palliative care or hospice care - to make sure they're living the kind of life that they want to live.

I have seen many die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words were ‘I love you.’ There were some who could no longer speak yet with their eyes and soft smile left behind that same healing message. I have been in rooms where those who were dying made it feel like sacred ground. (26)

To suggest that a person's strongly held religious view is less tolerant than a strongly held antireligious view is morally, intellectually, and politically inconsistent and incorrect.

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.