Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.

We find it difficult to choose our direction because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

Your decision to walk creates the path ahead

If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another.

I’m afraid you’re going to have to make a choice.

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?

Choosing a path means having to miss out on others

Decisions can be a major challenge for all of us.

My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake.

June smiled. "So what will it be? Safety, or a future of pain and possibility?"

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

What I find them struggling most isn't with one of the twelve [things from daily list]; I find them struggling with what decisions to make.

The most difficult of decisions are often not the ones in which we cannot determine the correct course; rather the ones in which we are certain of the path but fear the journey.

A person sometimes can't make a decision unless they know what decision to make.

You are the person who has to decide. Whether you'll do it or toss it aside.

I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.

All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.

You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.

I have no answers, but every day I wish I could have the same point of view for any 24-hour period. I wish I was in some system where I don't constantly question myself.

Life is more a matter of choosing than knowing. He could never know the eventual destination of his path, but he could always choose in which direction to take each step.

Indecision is the seedling of fear.

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

Fear reaches only to the point where the unavoidable begins; from there on, it loses its meaning. And all we have left is the hope that we are making the right decision.

How can you get very far, If you don't know who you are? How can you do what you ought, If you don't know what you've got? And if you don't know which to do Of all the things in front of you, Then what you'll have when you are through Is just a mess without a clue Of all the best that can come true If you know What and Which and Who.