Quotes About Fulfillment

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The great task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life

The pleasure principle is an artificial creation of psychology. Pleasure is not the goal of our aspirations, but the consequence of attaining them.

procreation is not the only meaning of life, for then life in itself would become meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful merely by its perpetuation.

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.

Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.

Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!

man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy.

When man can't find meaning in his life, he distracts himself with pleasure.

But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.

We give life meaning not only through our actions but also through loving and, finally, through suffering. Because how human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions—the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions—in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.

En última instancia, vivir significa asumir la responsabilidad de encontrar la respuesta correcta a las cuestiones que la existencia nos plantea, cumplir con las obligaciones que la vida nos asigna a cada uno en cada instante particular.

Whether a life is fulfilled does not depend on how great one's radius of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is fully filled out.

If we were immortal, we could legitimately postpone every action forever. [...] But in the face of death as absolute finis to our future and boundary to our possibilities, we are under the imperative of utilizing our lifetimes to the utmost, not letting the singular opportunities - whose finite sum constitutes the whole of life - pass by unused.

Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.

being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. 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

self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

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…as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.

En ese estado de embriaguez nostálgica se cruzó por mi mente un pensamiento que me petrificó, pues por primera vez comprendí la sólida verdad dispersa en las canciones de tantos poetas o proclamada en la brillante sabiduría de los pensadores y de los filósofos: el amor es la meta última y más alta a la que puede aspirar el hombre.

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:

Every therapy must in some way, no matter how restricted, also be logotherapy.

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.