Quotes About Mindset

we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.

A human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions,but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.

and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

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

When we are no longer able to change a situation— just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer —we are challenged to change ourselves.

any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually.

A human being, it is true, is a finite being. However, to the extent to which he understands his finiteness, he also overcomes it.

the priority stays with creatively changing the situation that causes us to suffer. But the superiority goes to the "know-how to suffer," if need be.

we are challenged to change ourselves.

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.

paradoxical intention" on the twofold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes.

A 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 in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist.

Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining.

suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

but even one such example is sufficient proof that man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.

suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy."5

it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.

Strangely enough, a blow which does not even find its mark can, under certain circumstances, hurt more than one that finds its mark.

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.

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.

M]an is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he succumbs to conditions or defies them. In other words, man is ultimately self determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.

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.