Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is "the last of human freedoms"—the ability to "choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!" It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man's sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended.

if I don't get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.

As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy

You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to saints. Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

El hombre que se levanta es aún más fuerte que el que no ha caído

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.

there are moments when indignation can rouse even a seemingly hardened prisoner-indignation not about cruelty or pain, but about the insult connected with it.

Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insuffcient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually.

At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.

My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience!

El amor es la única vía para llegar a lo más profundo de la personalidad de un hombre. Nadie conoce la esencia de otro ser humano si no lo ama. Por el acto espiritual del amor se contemplan los rasgos esenciales de la persona amada; incluso su potencialidad, lo que aún no ha sido revelado. Aún más: mediante el amor, la persona que ama capacita al amado a actualizar sus posibilidades ocultas. El amor consigue que el otro realice su potencialidad personal.

Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how

The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.

Auschwitz—the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres.

being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life.

one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them.

I]t is a matter of indifference what a person's occupation is, or at what job he works. The crucial thing is how he works, whether he in fact fills the place in which he happens to have landed. The radius of his activity is not important; important alone is whether he fills the circle of his tasks.

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As

In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof 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