Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest – and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.

For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/.../, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.

T]o ask the meaning of existence is meaningless in that existence precedes meaning. For the existence of meaning is assumed when we question the meaning of existence. Existence is, so to speak, the wall we are backed up against whenever we question it.

Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument—they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something

To be sure, the term, will to power, was coined by Nietzsche rather than Adler, and the term, will to pleasure—standing for Freud's pleasure principle—is my own and not Freud's.

Actúa como si vivieras por segunda vez y la primera lo hubieras hecho tan desacertadamente como estás a punto de hacerlo ahora'. Pocas estrategias estimulan más el sentido de la responsabilidad que esta máxima que invita a imaginar, primero que el presente ya es pasado y, segundo, que ese pasado se puede corregir.

The kind of lesson I had in spotting propaganda has long since dropped off the school curriculum. Yet it seems the time has again come when simple truths and basic human values need defending against the dangerous tides of hatred-spewing propagandists. Is it time again to bring back civics – lessons in speaking up, being a responsible citizen, and spotting today's Big Lies?

The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory." In

An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.

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!

Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naïve query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying.

Los hombres ilustres siempre recomienzan, y eso los convierte en admirables e imitables.

Sunday neurosis," that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will

En esos momentos no es el dolor físico lo que más hiere, sino la humillación y la indignación provocadas por la injusticia, por la cruda irracionalidad de todo aquello.

A positive attitude enables a person to endure suffering and disappointment as well as enhance enjoyment and satisfaction.

Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one's own life and that of the other fellow. It was typical to hear the prisoners, while they were being herded back to camp from their work sites in the evening, sigh with relief and say, "Well, another day is over.

Cualquier hombre, a lo largo de su vida, se verá enfrentado a su destino y tendrá la oportunidad de convertir un puro estado de sufrimiento en una hazaña interior.

The question which beset me was, "Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.

In another timely insight, Frankl saw that a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are "guzzling away" without any thought of morality.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to

A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely.