Quotes About Existentialism

Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how," as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.

the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy, we speak in this context of a super-meaning. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.

Doesn't the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn't this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual's knowledge and belief?

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.

Hayat?n anlam? insandan insana, günden güne ve hatta saatler içinde deÄŸiÅŸebilir. O yüzden de önemli olan genel olarak hayat?n anlam? deÄŸil, insan?n hayat?n?n verili bir andaki özel anlam?d?r.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

I have nothing to expect from life any more." What sort of answer can one give to that?

La supervivencia absorbía la personalidad hasta provocar un torbellino mental que ponía en duda la jerarquía de valores que había sostenido al prisionero antes del internamiento.

logoterapia es un método menos introspectivo y menos retrospectivo.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.

no es el sufrimiento en sí mismo el que madura o enturbia al hombre, es el hombre el que da sentido al sufrimiento. Hasta

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.

there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's nothingbutness, the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free.

Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment.

under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life.

Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning.

But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.

they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless. Naturally

Fue Lessing quien dijo en una ocasión: Hay cosas que deben haceros perder la razón, o entonces es que no tenéis ninguna razón que perder. Ante una situación anormal, la reacción anormal constituye una conducta normal.

mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.

Las palabras de Nietzsche «quien tiene un porqué para vivir puede soportar casi cualquier cómo» podrían ser la motivación de todos los esfuerzos