Quotes from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“The flower replied: You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“He who would be everything cannot be anything.”)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. Next, Darwin showed us that we were not central in the chain of life but, like all other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house-that much of our behavior is governed by forced outside of our consciousness. There is no doubt that Freud’s unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud’s birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forced and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“And what is the most terrible thing about boredom? Why do we rush to dispel it? Because it is a distraction-free state which soon enough reveals underlying unpalatable truths about existence—our insignificance, our meaningless existence, our inexorable progression to deterioration and death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices. For they are just the failings of mankind to which we also belong and accordingly we have all the same failings buried within ourselves. We should not be indignant with others for these vices simply because they do not appear in us at the moment.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Some cannot loosen their own chains yet can nonetheless liberate their friends. —Nietzsche”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality; all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“At the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexistence.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“marriage a debt that is contracted in youth and paid in old age….”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners condemned not to death but to life and as yet all too unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless every man desires to reach old age…a state of life of which it may be said “it is bad today, and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Some said living with cancer had made them wiser, more self-realized, while others had reordered their priorities in life, grown stronger, learned to say no to activities they no longer valued and yes to things that really mattered—such as loving their family and friends, observing the beauty about them, savoring the changing seasons.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“(...) Arthur ne aminteşte adesea (şi lui însuşi) că emoţia are puterea de a ascunde şi de a falsifica cunoaşterea; că lumea întreagă capătă un aspect senin atunci când avem motive să ne bucurăm şi unul întunecat şi posomorât atunci când ne copleşeşte părerea de rău”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Absolutely, bring any kind of carrot cake you wish.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“One cold winter’s day a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order, through their mutual warmth, to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effects of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now, when the need for warmth once again brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so they were tossed between two evils, until they discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the needs for society, which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men’s lives, drives them together but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities once more drive them apart.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Trăiește cum trebuie și ai încredere că vei da celorlalți lucruri bune, chiar dacă tu nu vei afla niciodată asta.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“من نیز با پیروی از فروید اغلب رؤیاپرداز را کوتوله ی فربه و سرحالی تصور می کنم که در دل جنگل دندریت ها و اکسون ها، زندگی خوبی برای خود دست و پا کرده است. روزها می خوابد ولی شب ها، با وزوز و همهمه ی سیناپس ها سر از نازبالشش برمی دارد، نوشابه ی عسلی اش را می نوشد و با تنبلی، رشته ی رؤیاهای میزبانش را درهم می تند... به قصه های مضحک پریان شبیه است. درست همان انسان انگاری رایج قرن نوزدهم. همان خطای متداول فروید در عینی نمایاندن ساختارهای انتزاعی ذهن و مبدل ساختنشان به جن و پری هایی مستقل و مختار. فقط کاش من هم باورش نداشتم! ”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“Were you really, truly, helpful to your patients? Maybe you've just learned to pick patients who were going to improve on their own anyway.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

“This world is supposed to have been made by a God? No, much better by a devil!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from The Schopenhauer Cure

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Popular quotes

“Could she give Doro what he wanted—what she herself had wanted for so long—children who would not die?”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Wild Seed

“I do not believe that God has given us this trial to not purpose. I know that the day will come when we will clearly understand why this persecution with all it's sufferings has been bestowed upon us -- for everything that Our Lord does is for our good. And yet, even as I write these words I feel the oppressive weight in my heart of those last stammering words of Kichijiro in the morning of his departure: "Why has Deus Sama imposed this suffering on us?" and then the resentment in those eyes that he turned upon me. "Father", he had said "what evil have we done?"

I suppose I should simply cast from my mind these meaningless words of the coward; yet why does his plaintive voice pierce my breast with tall the pain of a sharp needle? Why has Our Lord imposed this torture and this persecution on poor Japanese peasants? No, Kichijiro was trying to express something different, something even more sickening. The silence of God. Already twenty years have passed since the persecution broke out; the black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to Him, God has remained silent.”
― Shūsaku Endō, quote from Silence

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― A.J. Jacobs, quote from The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

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“None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.

It's not all that bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
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