Quotes About Purpose

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 ever ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.

A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist.

to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?

But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

suicide can be traced back to this existential vacuum. Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.

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

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

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. 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.

But Frankl's concern is less with the question of why most died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived.

YaÅŸamak ac? çekmektir; yaÅŸam? sürdürmek, çekilen bu ac?da bir anlam bulmaktad?r. EÄŸer yaÅŸamda bir amaç varsa, ac?da ve ölümde de bir amaç olmal?d?r. Ama hiç kimse bir baÅŸkas?na bu amac?n ne olduÄŸunu söyleyemez. Herkes bunu kendi ba??na bulmak ve bulduÄŸu yan?t?n öngördüÄŸü sorumluluÄŸu üstlenmek zorundad?r.

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.

The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his "provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life.

Freedom is not something we have and therefore can lose; freedom is what we are.

A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?

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.

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.

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.

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

Regarding our "provisional existence" as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless.

no importa lo que esperamos de la vida, sino que importa lo que la vida espera de nosotros.

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.