Quotes About Meaning

if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.

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.

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.

Their question was, "Will we survive the camp? For, if not, all this suffering has no meaning." The question which beset me was, "Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.

When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.

having a Why to live for enabled them to bear the How.

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:

In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

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

el amor trasciende la persona física del ser amado y halla su sentido más profundo en el ser espiritual, el yo íntimo. Que esté o no presente esa persona, que siga viva o no, en cierto modo carece de importancia.

son las circunstancias excepcionalmente adversas o difíciles las que otorgan al hombre la oportunidad de crecer espiritualmente más allá de sí mismo.

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.

To be sure, 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.

El realismo nos avisa que el sufrimiento es una parte consustancial de la vida, como el destino y la muerte. Sin ellos, la vida quedaría incompleta.

Son las circunstancias excepcionalmente adversas o difíciles las que otorgan al hombre la oportunidad de crecer espiritualmente más allá de si mismo.

Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.

Man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.

He was drowning in depression and contemplating suicide. One day a friend noticed that his outlook had changed to hopeful serenity. The soldier attributed his transformation to reading Man's Search for Meaning. When he was told about the soldier, Frankl wondered whether "there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy—healing through reading.

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather , to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.

T]he full gravity of the responsibility that every man bears throughout every moment of his life: the responsibility for what he will make of the next hour, for how he will shape the next day.

The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs." "That was it, exactly," Frankl said. "Those are the very words I had written." WILLIAM J. WINSLADE

He who has a strong enough why will find the how.