Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

That's something that I've always gotten: a sense of humanity, a sense of awareness of yourself and the world around you.

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

The most important thing for us to do as beings is to be aware of our position in the world on a micro and macro level.

In a lot of areas of my life, particularly in my teenage years, I began to think about the world, and to think about the universe as being a part of my conscious everyday life.

Would the world be any more dangerous if we did without secrets all together.

The scandal of the world is what makes the offence; it is not sinful to sin in silence.

To remain unknown in this modern world: that, indeed, is real power.

Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.

There's a marvelous peace in not publishing, there's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself.

Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!

That's one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don't let them.

The Milky Way swooped diagonally across the heavens, reminding me of my utter insignificance, and at the same time my complete interconnection with everything. I was just a tiny speck of consciousness, and yet I was consciousness itself.

The more you think about it, the more amazing the everyday world of human beings becomes: most of it doesn't actually exist at all.

I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.

I shouldn't have eavesdropped, but sometimes, that's the only way to find out the truth.

There are many difficult things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them.

Everyone has something to hide. And if they couldn't hide it the world would be in a lot worse mess than it is.

The only way to keep your secrets safe is to have none at all.

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

Be careful what you show the world. You never know when the wolf is watching.

A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

I think that the only way that you really keep it a secret is by not telling anyone.

There is no past. That's another illusion. Everything that has ever happened to you, to me, to anyone in this world, happened in the present moment. That's all there ever is. So your relationship to life isn't your relationship to your past, it's your relationship to the present moment.