Quotes from Viktor E. Frankl

Worshipping technique at the expense of encounter involves making man not only a mere thing, but also a mere means to an end.

At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.

The majority of prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be 'somebody.' Now we were treated like complete nonentities (The consciousness of one's inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?)

He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

It's not the physical pain which hurts the most, it is the mental agony caused by the injustice. The unreasonableness at all.

Danger only threatens when a political system sends those not-decent people, i.e., the negative element of a nation, to the top.

Niekas neturi teisÄ—s elgtis neteisingai, net ir tas, kuris pats neteisybÄ™ patyrÄ—.

Wir alle, die wir durch tausend und abertausend glückliche Zufälle oder Gotteswunder [...] davongekommen sind, wir wissen es und können es ruhig sagen: die Besten sind nicht zurückgekommen.

When a man finds it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

hay momentos en que la indignación puede surgir incluso en un prisionero aparentemente endurecido, indignación no causada por la crueldad o el dolor, sino por el insulto al que va unido.

Freedom is part of the story and half of the truth. Being free is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is being responsible. Freedom may degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

A person's suffering is similar to gas. If any amount of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill it completely. No matter how big the chamber. Suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is irrelevant. - Viktor Frankl for his analogy on human suffering and gas within a chamber.

W]hat counts in therapy is not techniques but rather the human relation between doctor and patient, or the personal and existential encounter. [...] A purely technological approach to psychotherapy may block its therapeutic effect. [...] [A]s soon and as long as we actually interpret our assignment merely in terms of techniques and dynamics we have missed the point—and we have missed the hearts of those to whom we wish to offer mental First Aid in their predicament.

Psychotherapy is more than technique in that it is art, and goes beyond pure science in that it is wisdom. [...] Wisdom requires the human touch.

Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.

the fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so.

Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation.

Due to the essentially self-transcendent quality of human existence man is a being reaching out beyond himself.

But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right then all our lives would be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else – preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which already seems obvious to us.

Come potrebbe essere bello il mondo!

Lebe so, als ob du zum zweiten Male lebtest und das erste Mal alles so falsch gemacht hättest, wie du es zu machen im Begriffe bist.

he says: I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked – and behold, duty was joy.

It is a tenet of Logotherapy that transcendence is the essence of existence. What is meant by this tenet is that existence is authentic only to the extent to which it points to something that is not itself. [...] Man [...] finds himself only to the extent to which he loses himself in the first place, be it for the sake of something or somebody, for the sake of a cause or a fellow-man, or "for God's sake.

It was Kierkegaard who told the wise parable that the door to happiness always opens 'outwards', which means it closes itself precisely against the person who tries to push the door to happiness 'inwards', so to speak.