Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

I've always been slightly preoccupied with death or whatever those kind of silly big questions people will tell you to not spend your time worrying about.

Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud , also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology .

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

I think it's really important for your mental health to think about the big questions, to discuss them and open your mind, in order to prepare you for both life and death.

Life is extremely complicated.

I am not a depressive person at all, but I reflect a lot on my life, and life in general, from the perspective of death.

I am really curious about life, about why we are all here. I notice my skin is ageing, things are changing, I've seen people dying, so that's the train we are all on.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Literature hasn't come up with any new themes. The literature of all different times - it's still dealing with how one resolves issues of existence.

For me, no matter what movie I make, no matter what the genre or the budget, they all have the same theme at their core: fear of death and happiness about living.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

Without zest, what is life? Just waiting for death?

If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.

Is there life before death? - that is the question!

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

Life is nothing in itself. It’s a place marker that proves who’s winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing but the winning. Even winning means nothing. We win because it’s an insult to lose. The ends don’t justify the means. The means don’t justify the ends. There is no one to justify to. There is no justice.” ~ Durzo Blint

We're afraid to live, because we're afraid of dying.

We don’t ask to be eternal beings. We only ask that things do not lose all their meaning.

I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason.

You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live.

... people misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.

I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning...as does death.