Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

iba a hacer. En aquel momento comprendí, con toda crudeza, que ningún sueño, por horrible que fuera, podía ser peor que la realidad del Lager a la que cruelmente iba a devolverlo.

To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself... by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to loved..

He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to call a Mephistophelean being, a satanic figure.

It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. … The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.

A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. 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

I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. 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

Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.

Having shown the beneficial impact of meaning orientation, I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the "existential vacuum.

If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor - or maybe because of it - we were carried away by nature's beauty

I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. 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.

The choices humans makes should be active rather than passive. In making personal choices we affirm our autonomy. A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, Frankl writes, bbut man is ultimately self determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment - he has made of himself..

The salvation of man is through love and in love.

Se necesitaba tiempo y paciencia para que estos hombres aceptasen la lisa y llana verdad de que nadie tiene derecho a hacer el mal, aunque se haya sufrido una atroz injusticia.

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?

key ideas: 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.

may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.

Yap?lan her ÅŸeye her an dikkat edilen zoraki bir topluluk yaÅŸam?n?n, en az?ndan geçici bir süre için de olsa, toplumdan kaçmaya yönelik dayan?lmaz bir güdü yaratt??? çok iyi bilinmektedir.

A realistic fear, like the fear of death, cannot be tranquilized away by its psychodynamic interpretation; on the other hand, a neurotic fear, such as agoraphobia, cannot be cured by philosophical understanding.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as "delusion of reprieve." The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.

Esas obligaciones y tareas, y en consecuencia el sentido de la vida, difieren en cada hombre, en un momento u otro, de manera que resulta imposible concebir el sentido de la vida en términos abstractos.

Quien tiene un porqué para vivir puede soportar casi cualquier cómo».

Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence.

Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible. That is why a logotherapist is the least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on his patients, for he will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging.

Comprendí como el hombre, desposeído de todo en este mundo, todavía puede conocer la felicidad -aunque sea momentáneamente- si contempla al ser querido.