Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

My mother, actually, is a therapist.

Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation.

Sometimes, when we're feeling challenged in life, we feel a pull to isolate, and for me part of the joy of being a wife, a mother, and in a cast of friends is allowing myself to be in spaces of love. So being open to that love.

Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

Marriage will not solve "aloneness."

To keeping silence I resigned My friends would think I was a nut Turning water into wine Open doors would soon be shut So I went from day to day Though my life was in a rut 'Til I thought of what I'd say Which connection I should cut

As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it's a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell - of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets.

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.

Years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement [Lyndon Johnson] could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it.

Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace.

I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn't want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn't understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores.

Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.

Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

If you find yourself running away from something and then suddenly you're isolated in a vacuum, then you have to deal with all the inherent truths and learning things about yourself and the people that are around you.

A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.

But a man needs company.

Even with one companion ecstasy is almost banished.

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

When I was eleven I stopped dreaming the dreams that didn't come true, I stopped talking to people who didn't listen, I lost hope and I retreated. I assumed that the root of the problem was that I was too strange for the real world. That being the case, I created a charming and dynamic personality to make the necessary forays into the Outside, and I kept my strangeness for myself; my own peculiar jewels under lock and key.