Marilyn Yalom Quotes & Sayings

born to avenge my sex and dominate yours — Marilyn Yalom

Friendship matters, especially in old age, when death reduces the number of one's friends. — Marilyn Yalom

I think people are more likely to think it's better to find something new. That mentality has affected all of our thinking. — Marilyn Yalom

How many times have I heard in France of women who have been married for many years and the husband has had mistresses and you ask, "Why does she put up with it?" Because she loves him! Love is justification for so many things Americans would never put up with. — Marilyn Yalom

Do we still expect spouses to exert a moral influence upon each other? The notion that husband and wife should make each other better people does not resonate with the most visible goals of contemporary American society. How many young people marry with the conscious expectation that they will become kinder and wiser by virtue of choosing a decent, generous mate? Happier, richer, more successful. Yes! But better human beings? — Marilyn Yalom

Our history suggests that women will continue to show the world how to be friends. — Marilyn Yalom

At some level of consciousness, all lovers know this. If you cease to care for the person you love, you will give up a vital piece of your identity. You will become someone else. You will look back on your past love with tenderness or anger or some other combination of feelings, but you will not be able to recapture the same emotions you once felt. — Marilyn Yalom

true love cannot extend its claims to spouses. — Marilyn Yalom

For a French person, lack of desire in someone is really seen as a defect. — Marilyn Yalom

There is a belief that love has its own justification, that it should be experienced as passionately as possible. The French have a wonderful expression, amour passion, which is the ultimate. — Marilyn Yalom

The reality of social networking sites is that they provide platforms for online personae to interact with other online personae. Importantly, such relationships can be ended with a click of an 'unfriend,' 'unfollow,' or 'block' button. Breaking up like this constitutes a morally lightweight action. Certainly it flies in the face of Cicero's advice that a friendship 'should seem to fade away rather than to be stamped out.' The respect that Cicero demanded that we pay to a friendship, even one that has turned sour, did not anticipate the tenuous connection inherent in being a facebook friend. — Marilyn Yalom

In France, you have 900 years of romantic love going back to the troubadours and minstrels that wrote stories of Lancelot and Guinevere. You have gallantry at the highest level. — Marilyn Yalom

The prohibition on promoting a pawn to a queen while the original queen was still on the board was an attempt to preserve the uniqueness of the king's wife, his only permissible conjugal mate according to Christian doctrine. The Arabic game did not have to face that problem because a Muslim ruler could theoretically have as many viziers as he wanted. The idea of multiple queens on the chessboard proved so anxiety-making for Europeans that it remained a subject of contention for centuries to come. — Marilyn Yalom

Living in an age of casual sex, serial commitments, and frequent divorce, we are all in danger of becoming as jaded as anceien regime aristocrats. Does the notion of undying love still have any meaning for us today? — Marilyn Yalom

As Petrus Alfonsi, the converted physician authored a book called the Disciplina Clericalis, which was essentially a collection of Arabic tales translated into Latin. These tales introduced a mode of Oriental storytelling and wisdom literature into Christendom that would become extremely popular. In the section called "The Mule and the Fox," concerning the true nature of nobility, Alfonsi listed seven accomplishments expected of a knight. "The skills that one must be acquainted with are as follows: Riding, swimming, archery, boxing, hawking, chess, and verse writing."6 So, by the beginning of the twelfth century, chess had become a mandatory skill for Spain's elite warriors. — Marilyn Yalom

We live in a society where we don't want to commit to another person for life. We do at the moment that we marry, but less and less people marry. We marry later, we marry less. On some level of the unconscious, we know there is less of a chance that a marriage will be life-long. — Marilyn Yalom

neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain and The Male Brain, which point out that a man has two and a half times as much brain space devoted to sexual pursuit as a woman, while the female brain's empathy system is considerably more active than the male's.3) — Marilyn Yalom