Irvin D. Yalom Anxiety Quotations

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

...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.