Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

Don't aim at success ? the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. 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.

I bear witness of the inestimable extent to which man, although he is never free from conditions and determinants, is always free to take a stand to whatever he might have to face. Although he may be conditioned and determined, he is never fully determined, he is not pandetermined.

Man's intrinsically human capacity to take a stand to whatever may confront him includes his capacity to choose his attitude toward himself, more specifically, to take a stand towards his own somatic and psychic conditions and determinants.

there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

Obviously the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards. I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human something which this man also gave to me - the word and look which accompanied the gift.

It is, therefore, up to the patient to decide whether he should interpret his life task as being responsible to society or to his own conscience. There are people, however, who do not interpret their own lives merely in terms of a task assigned to them but also in terms of the taskmaster who has assigned it to them.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. 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, to  choose one's own way.

We are living in an age of specialists but sometimes a specialist is a man who no longer sees the forest of truth for the trees of fact.

Anything outside the barbed wire became remote - out of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world.

T]he real danger does not lie in the fact that there is a lack or a loss of universality of knowledge among the specialists. The true danger lies in the pretense and claim of totality of knowledge.

There is no danger in scientists specializing. The actual danger is that the specialists are generalizing.

There is determinism in the psychological dimension, and freedom in the noological dimension which is the human dimension, the dimension of human phenomena.

Reductionism deprives the human phenomenon of its very humanness, by making it a mere epiphenomenon, that is to say, by reducing a human phenomenon to intrinsically subhuman phenomena.

To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances--because life itself is--but it is also possible under all circumstances.

Being human means always being directed toward something other than oneself. [...] Human existence is not characterized by self-actualization but rather by what I call self-transcendence—pointing beyond itself.

Der er et vist mål af frihed til enhver, selv om det kun gælder valget af hårfarve.

T]he danger never lies in a technique in itself, but solely in the spirit in which the technique is applied and handled.

Ultimately, man is not subject to the conditions that confront him; rather, these conditions are subject to his decision.

Logotherapy claims that what are transitory and passing are the possibilities, the chances to realize values, the opportunities to create, to experience, and to suffer meaningfully. Once the possibilities have been realized they no longer are passing, they have passed and are part of the past—which means that they have been conserved; nothing can change them, nothing can make them undone. They remain for eternity.

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.

La conciencia del amor propio está tan profundamente arraigada en las cosas más elevadas y más espirituales, que no puede arrancarse ni viviendo en un campo de concentración. ¿Pero cuántos hombres libres, por no hablar de los prisioneros, la poseen?

The, world is not, as a great existential philosopher has seen it, a manuscript written in a code we have to decipher. No, the world is no manuscript which we are asked to decipher, but cannot; it is, rather, a record which we have to dictate ourselves.

An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity  to realize values in creative work

There are two main features and traits which characterize and constitute human existence. The first is self-transcendence—the fact that man is always reaching beyond himself, reaching out for meaning to fulfill, for other beings to encounter. The second is self-detachment, the intrinsically human capacity to rise above the level of somatic and psychic data, above the plane within which an animal being moves and to which an animal being is bound.