Quotes About Meaning

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 love.

According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self.

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

Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.

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. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way

focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning.

freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

The innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a psychosis. An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.

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

He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how

logoterapia es un método menos introspectivo y menos retrospectivo.

It goes without saying that meaning and purpose in life cannot be prescribed like a drug. It is not the job of a doctor to give meaning to the patient's life. But it may well be his task, through an existential analysis, to enable the patient to find meaning in life.

suffering is not necessary to find meaning, only that "meaning is possible in spite of suffering.

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.

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.

If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

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.

la verdadera autorrealización sólo es el efecto profundo del cumplimiento acabado del sentido de la vida.

According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centred, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term striving for superiority, is focused.

the logotherapeutic "notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People