Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness.

The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

I don't know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad! But life and death go hand in hand. It's our condition as human beings.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence, I know likewise that I shall exist no more when I shall have ceased to feel.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

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.

Your body must become familiar with its death - in all its possible forms and degrees - as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.

I think there's a big price to pay for consciousness, knowing that it's all going to end and we're mortal. I envy dogs. They don't know they're getting old! And they don't know it's towards the end. I mean, they never think, 'I used to get by on 16 hours of sleep a day. Now, if I don't get 19, I'm a wreck.'

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal.

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

Life, the permission to know death.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance