Quotes About Humanity

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.

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.

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.

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?

But ultimately man can actualize himself only by fulfilling a meaning out there in the world rather than within himself so that self-actualization becomes an effect of "self-transcendence." Being human means relating and being directed to something or someone other than oneself.

Tilly must have been among them.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human

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.

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

The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

About conscience - sense of right / wrong) No one will be able to make us believe that man is a sublimated animal once we can show that within him there is a repressed angel.

O]ne may define values as those meaning-universals which crystallize in the typical situations a society—humanity—has to face.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Ceux qui ont vécu dans les camps se souviennent de ces prisonniers qui allaient, de baraque en baraque, consoler leurs semblables, leur offrant les derniers morceaux de pain qui leur restaient. Même s'il s'agit de cas rares, ceux-ci nous apportent la preuve qu'on peut tout enlever à un homme excepté une chose, la dernière des libertés humaines : celle de décider de sa conduite, quelles que soient les circonstances dans lesquelles il se trouve.

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and other- wise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people

Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

Tình yêu không ch? g?n li?n vá»›i sá»± hi?n h?u c?a th? xác. Tình yêu tìm th?y ý nghÄ©a sâu s?c nh?t trong tâm trí, trong chính ná»™i tâm c?a con ng??i. Cho dù ng??i ?y có thá»±c sá»± t?n t?i, có còn s?ng hay không cÅ©ng không quan tr?ng.

M]an not only finds his life meaningful through his deeds, his works, his creativity, but also through his experiences, his encountering what is true, good, and beautiful in the world, and, last but not least, his encounter with another, a fellow human being in his very uniqueness.

The grasping of another person in his uniqueness means loving him[.]