Quotes About Perspective

sub specie aeternitatis.

Hayat?n anlam? insandan insana, günden güne ve hatta saatler içinde deÄŸiÅŸebilir. O yüzden de önemli olan genel olarak hayat?n anlam? deÄŸil, insan?n hayat?n?n verili bir andaki özel anlam?d?r.

Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching. It is as far removed from logical reasoning as it is from moral exhortation. 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.

Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.

a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative. It

consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn't it the same with life?

do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.

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.

No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same. Long

I doubt whether a doctor can answer this question in general terms. For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past—the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized—and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.

From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past—the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized—and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.

At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us

Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, a meaning which even included all of her sufferings. By the same token, however, it had become clear as well that a life of short duration, like that, for example, of her dead boy, could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.

No, thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past

All this came to my mind when I saw the photographs in the magazine. When I explained, my listeners understood why I did not find the photograph so terrible: the people shown on it might not have been so unhappy after all.

Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

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

some of the prisoners attempted to find one on their own. It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future—sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.

Suffering ceases to be suffering when it finds meaning

We are living in an age of specialists but sometimes a specialist is a man who no longer sees the forest of truth for the trees of fact.

Anything outside the barbed wire became remote - out of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world.

Some people say that a man dying in a sudden accident sees his whole life flash by, like a fantastically fast movie. To stay with this concept, one might say that in death, man has become the movie himself. He now 'is' his life as he lived it, he is his own life history as it happened to him, as good as he has created it. Thus, he is his own heaven and his own hell.

In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.