Reader > Reader's Quotes

“Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch

“...the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

“One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn

“look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are - Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life

“Maybe the fear is that
we are less than
we think we are,
when the
actuality of it
is that we are much much more.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness

“We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing... We may only go in circles...”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“Awareness is not the same as thinking. It is a complementary form of intelligence, a way of knowing that is at least as wonderful and as powerful, if not more so, than thinking.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

“One very important domain of our lives and experience that we tend to miss, ignore, abuse, or lose control of as a result of being in the automatic pilot mode is our own body.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, Revised Edition: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using mindfulness meditation

“Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn't mean you can't hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“Life only unfolds in moments. The healing power of mindfulness lies in living each of those moments as fully as we can, accepting it as it is as we open to what comes next—in the next moment of now.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness