Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really us. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisreal on his lips.

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. The

If all men were perfect, then every individual would be replaceable by anyone else. From the very imperfection of men follows the indispensability and inexchangeability of each individual; for each is imperfect in his own fashion.

El realismo nos avisa que el sufrimiento es una parte consustancial de la vida, como el destino y la muerte. Sin ellos, la vida quedaría incompleta.

For in every case man retains the freedom and the possibility of deciding for or against the influence of his surroundings.

Son las circunstancias excepcionalmente adversas o difíciles las que otorgan al hombre la oportunidad de crecer espiritualmente más allá de si mismo.

Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.

Man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.

He was drowning in depression and contemplating suicide. One day a friend noticed that his outlook had changed to hopeful serenity. The soldier attributed his transformation to reading Man's Search for Meaning. When he was told about the soldier, Frankl wondered whether "there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy—healing through reading.

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather , to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.

He also believed strongly in reconciliation rather than revenge; he once remarked, "I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.

by a prominent psychologist, Dr. Gordon Allport, and the Foreword to this new edition is written by a clergyman. We have come to recognize that this is a profoundly religious book. It insists that life is meaningful and that we must learn to see life as meaningful despite

T]he full gravity of the responsibility that every man bears throughout every moment of his life: the responsibility for what he will make of the next hour, for how he will shape the next day.

al hombre se le puede arrebatar todo salvo una cosa: la última de las libertades humanas —?la elección de la actitud personal que debe adoptar frente al destino—? para decidir su propio camino.

The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs." "That was it, exactly," Frankl said. "Those are the very words I had written." WILLIAM J. WINSLADE

He who has a strong enough why will find the how.

The fear is mother of the event.

Of course, this was no therapy in the proper sense since, first, his despair was no disease; and second, I could not change his fate; I could not revive his wife. But in that moment I did succeed in changing his attitude toward his unalterable fate inasmuch as from that time on he could at least see a meaning in his suffering.

A man's character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt.

Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influences.

To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.

More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.