Quotes About Meaning

To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances--because life itself is--but it is also possible under all circumstances.

Being human means always being directed toward something other than oneself. [...] Human existence is not characterized by self-actualization but rather by what I call self-transcendence—pointing beyond itself.

Logotherapy claims that what are transitory and passing are the possibilities, the chances to realize values, the opportunities to create, to experience, and to suffer meaningfully. Once the possibilities have been realized they no longer are passing, they have passed and are part of the past—which means that they have been conserved; nothing can change them, nothing can make them undone. They remain for eternity.

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.

The, world is not, as a great existential philosopher has seen it, a manuscript written in a code we have to decipher. No, the world is no manuscript which we are asked to decipher, but cannot; it is, rather, a record which we have to dictate ourselves.

An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity  to realize values in creative work

There are two main features and traits which characterize and constitute human existence. The first is self-transcendence—the fact that man is always reaching beyond himself, reaching out for meaning to fulfill, for other beings to encounter. The second is self-detachment, the intrinsically human capacity to rise above the level of somatic and psychic data, above the plane within which an animal being moves and to which an animal being is bound.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Men, in general, misunderstand the meaning of death. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning and frightens us from our dreams, we regard this awakening as a terrifying intrusion upon our dream world and do not realize that the alarm arouses us to our real existence, our day world. Do we mortals not act similarly, being frightened when death comes? Do we not also misunderstand that death awakens us to the true reality of ourselves?

Just as the boomerang returns to the hunter who has thrown it, only if it has missed its target, man returns to himself, reflects upon himself and becomes over-concerned with self-interpretation only when he has missed his mission, and has been frustrated in his search for meaning.

Sounding out to bless me and perhaps to say That you forgive me that I live.

Human responsibility rests on the 'activism of the future,' the choosing of possibilities from the future, and the 'optimism of the past,' the making these possibilities a reality and thereby rescuing them into the haven of the past.

But ultimately man can actualize himself only by fulfilling a meaning out there in the world rather than within himself so that self-actualization becomes an effect of "self-transcendence." Being human means relating and being directed to something or someone other than oneself.

Even if you don't expect anything from life, doesn't life expect something from you?

at the lectern in a large, beautiful, warm and bright hall. I was about to give a lecture to an interested audience on, "Psychotherapeutic Experiences in a Concentration Camp" (the actual title I later used at that congress41

Under the same conditions, those who were oriented toward the future, toward a meaning that waited to be fulfilled—these persons were more likely to survive. Nardini and Lifton, two American military psychiatrists

What is actually man's concern is not to fulfill himself or to actualize himself but to fulfill meaning and to realize value. And only to the extent to which he fulfills concrete and personal meaning of his own existence will he also fulfill himself. Self-fulfillment occurs by itself; not through intention but as effect.

M]an never, or at least not normally and primarily, sees in the partners whom he encounters and in the causes to which he commits himself merely a means to an end; for then he actually would have destroyed any authentic relationship to them. Then, they would have become mere tools, being of use for him, but, by the same token, would have ceased to have any value, that is to say, value in itself.

O]ur patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful.

Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. [...] If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke.

M]eaning cannot be grasped by merely intellectual means, for it supersedes essentially—or to speak more specifically—dimensionally, man's capacity as a finite being. [...] This meaning necessarily transcends man and his world and, therefore, cannot be approached by merely rational processes. [...] [W]hat we have to deal with is no intellectual or rational process, but a wholly existential act which perhaps could be described by [...] 'the basic trust in Being'.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness. Happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue. Happiness is available only as a by-product, as the side-effect of living out the self-transcendence of existence.

W]hat matters is not the meaning of man's life in general. To look for the general meaning of man's life would be comparable to the question put to a chess player: "What is the best move?" There is no move at all, irrespective of the concrete situation of a special game. The same holds for human existence inasmuch as one can search only for the concrete meaning of personal existence, a meaning which changes from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour.