Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

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.

Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.

Death doesn't frighten me, it bothers me. It bothers me for example that someone can be there tomorrow but me I am no longer there. What bothers me is no longer being alive, not being dead.

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.

I found that the things I am afraid of most are things for which there are no obvious remedies. Like, what do you do with a fear of death? You either come to terms with it or you don't, but there's no solving it.

I think our children are afraid to die because we're afraid to die.

He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.

In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

The eunuch had looked death in the face, so near he might have kissed her on the lips.

One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun.

There are two things which Man cannot look at directly without flinching: the sun and death.

A small fact: You are going to die....does this worry you?

I hope I am not too repetitive. However, coming to terms with death is part of the general human situation.

The definition of 'morbid' is an unhealthy preoccupation with death. Unfortunately, there's no word to mean the perfectly healthy preoccupation with death, which is what I have.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone - I think it does really, I'm just a little more out about it.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.

In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.