Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

In other words, life's meaning is an unconditional one, for it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering.

if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person's life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one's shelves.

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

A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is.

la salvación del hombre consiste en el amor y pasa por el amor.

the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives.

ViaÈ›a e ca atunci când mergi la dentist; te tot gândeÈ™ti c? urmeaz? ce-i mai r?u È™i când colo totul s-a terminat deja.

the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

As we said before, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.

As we see, the priority stays with creatively changing the situation that causes us to suffer. But the superiority goes to the know-how to suffer, if need be

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, to choose one's own way.

Con lo expuesto podemos concluir que hay dos razas de hombres en el mundo, solo dos: la de los hombres decentes y la de los indecentes. Ambas se mezclan en todas partes y en todas las capas sociales. Ningún grupo social se compone exclusivamente de hombres decentes o indecentes. En este sentido, ningún grupo es de «pura raza», y por ello había entre los guardias personas decentes.

How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we may even try to predict the mechanisms or "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.

when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned.

I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons.

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.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.

Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.

This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy, we speak in this context of a super-meaning. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.

These values, however, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level—they are something that we are.

statement is an oversimplification; yet in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. And to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis.

Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why—an aim—for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence.

must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die. And finally

Logotherapy conceives of conscience as a prompter which, if need be, indicates the direction in which we have to move in a given life situation. In order to carry out such a task, conscience must apply a measuring stick to the situation one is confronted with, and this situation has to be evaluated in the light of a set of criteria, in the light of a hierarchy of values