Quotes About Humanity

a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

el amor es la meta última y más alta a la que puede aspirar el hombre.

Auschwitz—the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres.

one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them.

He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest – and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.

An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.

He main retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevsky said once, 'There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings'.

The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.

Y entonces, después de dar unos pasos en silencio, un prisionero le dijo a otro: ¡Qué bello podría ser el mundo!

a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and  conscious mind, no matter  whether  the  suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

Quién es, en realidad, el hombre? Es el ser que siempre decide lo que es. Es el ser que inventó las cámaras de gas, pero también es el ser que entró en ellas con paso firme y musitando una oración.

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who in­ vented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Los supervivientes de los campos aún recordamos a los hombres que iban a los barracones a consolar a los demás, ofreciéndoles su único mendrugo de pan. Quizá no fueron muchos, pero esos pocos son una muestra irrefutable de que al hombre se le puede arrebatar todo, salvo una cosa: la libertad humana —la libre elección de la acción personal ante las circunstancias— para elegir el propio camino.

And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man's world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?

Notably, he renounced the idea of collective guilt. Frankl was able to accept that his Viennese colleagues and neighbors may have known about or even participated in his persecution, and he did not condemn them for failing to join the resistance or die heroic deaths. Instead, he was deeply committed to the idea that even a vile Nazi criminal or a seemingly hopeless madman has the potential to transcend evil or insanity by making responsible choices.

al hombre se le puede arrebatar todo, salvo una cosa: la libertad humana —la libre elección de la acción personal ante las circunstancias

Ser hombre implica dirigirse hacia algo o alguien distinto de uno mismo, bien sea para realizar un valor, bien para alcanzar un sentido o para encontrar a otro ser humano.

He describes poignantly the prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die.

men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest – and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.

The basis for any predictions would be represented by biological, psychological or sociological conditions. Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.

The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What

The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one's fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.