Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

birth life death darkness spark

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

life despair

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

life future children immortality

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

creativity orthodoxy

Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.

marriage jealousy possession

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has eve known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

psychology

You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.

teaching