Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: "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

do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.

plantea. Cuando un hombre descubre que su destino es sufrir, ha de aceptar ese sufrimiento, porque ese sufrimiento se convierte en su única y peculiar tarea. Es más, ese sufrimiento le otorga el carácter de persona única e irrepetible en el universo.

Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for! Perhaps he boarded a trolley, traveled out to the home which he had seen for years in his mind, and only in his mind, and pressed the bell, just as he has longed to do in thousands of dreams, only to find that the person who should open the door was not there, and would never be there again.

Cuando un hombre descubre que su destino es sufrir, ha de aceptar dicho sufrimiento, pues ésa es su sola y única tarea. Ha de reconocer el hecho de que, incluso sufriendo, él es único y está solo en el universo. Nadie puede redimirle de su sufrimiento ni sufrir en su lugar. Su única oportunidad reside en la actitud que adopte al soportar su carga.

suffering is not necessary to find meaning, only that "meaning is possible in spite of suffering.

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

minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence. What else remained for us as a material link with our former lives? For me there were my glasses and my belt; the latter I had to exchange later on for a piece of bread.

a person "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." He concedes that only a few prisoners of the Nazis were able to do the former, "but even one such example is sufficient proof that man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.

Frankl is credited with establishing logotherapy as a psychiatric technique that uses existential analysis to help patients resolve their emotional conflicts. He stimulated many

A human being, it is true, is a finite being. However, to the extent to which he understands his finiteness, he also overcomes it.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.

psychogenic neuroses. Noögenic neuroses have their origin not in the psychological but rather in the "noölogical" (from the Greek noös meaning mind) dimension of human existence. This is another logotherapeutic term which denotes anything pertaining to the specifically human dimension.

man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.

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.

this book is less about his travails, what he suffered and lost, than it is about the sources of his strength to survive.

If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.

la verdadera autorrealización sólo es el efecto profundo del cumplimiento acabado del sentido de la vida.

Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

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.

According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centred, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term striving for superiority, is focused.

La unicidad y la resolución que diferencian a cada individuo y confieren un significado a su existencia tienen su incidencia en la actividad creativa, al igual que la tienen en el amor.

the logotherapeutic "notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.