Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

"When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign."

"I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story."

"The ultimate goal of therapy... it's too hard a question. The words come to me like tranquility, like fulfillment, like realizing your potential."

"We're passing on something of ourselves to others. I feel that's what makes our life full of meaning. It's hard to have meaning in a closet, encapsulated by nothing. I think you really have to expand yourself and your life and do what you can for other people."

"I think all kinds of meanings in life transcend your self. They're linked to other generations of people around us, to our children and our family. We're passing on something of ourselves to others. I feel that's what makes our life full of meaning."

"We're not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams."

"From the very early days of seeing patients, I noticed that many of them seemed to be concerned with issues of their mortality, and so the philosophy training I had taken began to seem rather important to me."

"With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels."

"Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful."

"The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived."

"I think everybody I've seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably, it's very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They're not really interested in the person; he doesn't relate to the person."

"I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed."

"I don't want to be idealized by a patient because of what I've written."

"Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do."