Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

O]ur patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful.

So conscience is essentially intuitive. To anticipate what is not yet, but is to be made real, conscience must be based on intuition. And it is in this sense that conscience may be called irrational.

Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. [...] If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke.

M]eaning cannot be grasped by merely intellectual means, for it supersedes essentially—or to speak more specifically—dimensionally, man's capacity as a finite being. [...] This meaning necessarily transcends man and his world and, therefore, cannot be approached by merely rational processes. [...] [W]hat we have to deal with is no intellectual or rational process, but a wholly existential act which perhaps could be described by [...] 'the basic trust in Being'.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness. Happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue. Happiness is available only as a by-product, as the side-effect of living out the self-transcendence of existence.

W]hat matters is not the meaning of man's life in general. To look for the general meaning of man's life would be comparable to the question put to a chess player: "What is the best move?" There is no move at all, irrespective of the concrete situation of a special game. The same holds for human existence inasmuch as one can search only for the concrete meaning of personal existence, a meaning which changes from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour.

A human being is a deciding being.

In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he

You don't retire from a job (which may have become stale) but to an activity that is meaningful to you.

M]an is by no means a product of inheritance and environment. Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end education is just education towards the ability to decide.

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 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.

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. Humans are rather in search of of a reason to be happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent in a given situtation.

S]elf-transcendence is one of the basic features of human existence. Only as man withdraws from himself in the sense of releasing self-centered interest and attention will he gain an authentic mode of existence.

A state that is already economically so badly off that it relies on eliminating the relatively insignificant percentage of its incurable citizens in order to save on [resources] -such a state has already reached the end economically.

The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his "provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed;

There is no conceivable human condition in which man may be relieved of the tension between what he has done and, on the other hand, what he must yet do or should have done.

S]ex is devalued insofar as it is dehumanized. Sex in humans is always more than mere sex. It serves as the bodily expression of a relationship on the human level; it functions as a vehicle of a personal relationship.

M]an is by no means merely a product of heredity and environment. There is a third element: decision. Man ultimately decides for himself! And, in the end, education must be education toward the ability to decide.

Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in that space is your power and your freedom.

daß niemand das Recht hat, Unrecht zu tun, auch der nicht, der Unrecht erlitten hat.

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

Cách má»™t ng??i ch?p nh?n s? ph?n và nh?ng Ä'au kh? c?a mình, cách má»™t ng??i dám v??t qua nh?ng thá»­ thách Ä'ó Ä'em l?i cho ng??i ?y nhi?u cÆ¡ há»™i ?? hi?u ???c ý nghÄ©a sâu xa hÆ¡n c?a cuá»™c s?ng ngay c? trong nh?ng hoàn c?nh kh?c nghi?t nh?t.

An individual, for example, who is afraid of blushing when he enters a large room and faces many people will actually be more prone to blush under these circumstances. In this context, one might amend the saying The wish is father to the thought to The fear is mother of the event.