Author of quotes: Irvin Yalom

I try in every possible way to maintain and strengthen long-standing friendships - after all, we cannot make new old friends.

You know, none of those who were adults when I was a child remained alive. So as a child, I'm dead. Someday, in forty years, there will be no one alive who ever knew me at all. That's when I'll die for real - when I no longer exist in anyone's memory. I thought a lot about the fact that some very old person is the last person alive who remembers another person or a whole circle of people. When this person dies, this whole circle also disappears from living memory. I asked myself, who will be the last person whose death will make me completely dead?

Both of them were chicks with broken wings, each of which tried to fly by grabbing another equally sick chick. People who feel empty are never healed by connecting with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two birds with broken wings, united, make a very clumsy flight. No amount of patience can help them fly; and in the end they must be separated and the wounds healed each separately.

You don't know this person. You, as Proust would say, fill this being with those qualities that you yourself dream of. And fall in love with your own creation."

“We fill in the physical outline of the being we see with all the ideas we have already built about it, and in the final image of it that we create in our mind, these ideas, of course, occupy the main place. Finally, they fit so closely to the contours of his cheeks, follow the curve of his nose so perfectly, blend so harmoniously with the sound of his voice, that it all seems to be nothing more than a transparent shell, so that every time we see a face or hear a voice , we recognize in it nothing more than our own ideas about it.

“As if the fullness of the soul does not sometimes pour out in empty metaphors! After all, no one has yet been able to find the exact words to express their aspirations, intentions, sorrows, because human speech is like a cracked cauldron, and when we want to touch the stars with our music, we get a dog waltz.

My personal and professional experience has convinced me that the fear of death torments more those who feel the incompleteness of their lives. A good practical formula: a person fears death the more, the less he truly lives his life and the greater his unrealized potential.

The problem with this setup is that you have to live without people around. Maybe this is one of the reasons for your feeling of inner emptiness. One way or another, any relationship ends sooner or later. There is no lifetime warranty. It's like refusing to watch the sunrise because you hate the sunset.

The feeling that more needed to be done reflects, I think, an underlying desire to control the uncontrollable. After all, if a person feels guilty about not doing something they should have done, then it follows that something could have been done - a convenient thought that distracts us from our pitiful helplessness in the face of death. Clothed in an elaborate illusion of limitless possibilities, we all, at least until the onset of a mid-life crisis, hold on to the belief that our existence is an endlessly ascending spiral of achievement, dependent only on our will.

“Even so, even if you are alone in your boat, it is always calmer to see the lights of other boats rocking nearby.

... with repeated contact, a person can get used to anything, even to dying.

At seventeen, I was convinced that my father was a complete fool. At twenty-one, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in four years.

We love the desire itself more than the desired.

People want to interact with other people, they are excited by the opportunity to provide and receive direct feedback, they are eager to know how others perceive them, they want to peel off their front facade and long for intimacy.