Quotes About Meaning

Gordon W. Allport's book, The Individual and His Religion:

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 life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.

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.

Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, 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 only a few people were capable

More and more, a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems, rather than neurotic symptoms. Some of the people who nowadays call upon a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest, or rabbi in former days. Now they often refuse to be handed over to a clergyman, and instead confront the doctor with questions such as: What is the meaning of my life?.

once lost, the will to live seldom returned.

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.

iba a hacer. En aquel momento comprendí, con toda crudeza, que ningún sueño, por horrible que fuera, podía ser peor que la realidad del Lager a la que cruelmente iba a devolverlo.

To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself... by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to loved..

Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, 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.

Having shown the beneficial impact of meaning orientation, I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the "existential vacuum.

The salvation of man is through love and in love.

key ideas: 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 greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

Esas obligaciones y tareas, y en consecuencia el sentido de la vida, difieren en cada hombre, en un momento u otro, de manera que resulta imposible concebir el sentido de la vida en términos abstractos.

Quien tiene un porqué para vivir puede soportar casi cualquier cómo».

Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence.

Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible. That is why a logotherapist is the least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on his patients, for he will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging.

Comprendí como el hombre, desposeído de todo en este mundo, todavía puede conocer la felicidad -aunque sea momentáneamente- si contempla al ser querido.

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.

The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love.

To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist's role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.

It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that 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.

Having been is the surest kind of being.

No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.