Viktor E. Frankl
Pain from problems and disappointments, etc., is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice determined by whether you choose to compare your experience and pain to something better and therefore feel unlucky and bitter or to something worse and therefore feel lucky and grateful!Collection: Gratitude
I do not forget any good deed done to me & I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.Collection: Deeds Done
Ultimate freedom is a man's right to choose his attitude.Collection: Attitude
Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.Collection: Life
I would say that our 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.Collection: Meaningful
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.Collection: Lying
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.Collection: Life
I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.Collection: Men
Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.Collection: Life
Most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.Collection: Life
The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.Collection: Existence
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.Collection: Life
The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.Collection: Angel
Logotherapy . . . considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts.Collection: Men
At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.Collection: Men
Once an individual's search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with sufferingCollection: Successful
As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons.Collection: Thinking
Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.Collection: Men
In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet"-and the light shineth in the darkness.Collection: Morning
These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning in life in a general way.Collection: Men
Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.Collection: Motivation
We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.Collection: Talking
A sound philosophy of life, I think, may be the most valuable asset for a psychiatrist to have when he is treating a patient.Collection: Philosophy
Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.Collection: Unhappy
Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.Collection: Purpose
But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.Collection: Real
I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.Collection: Attitude
Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.Collection: Lying
There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations." But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations.Collection: Defense
Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.Collection: Past
We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life.Collection: Life
There is also purpose in 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.Collection: Life
How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we many even try to predict the mechanisms or "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.Collection: Men
Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.Collection: Kind
We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents...Sometimes the 'unfinisheds' are among the most beautiful symphonies.Collection: Beautiful
Ultimately, we are not subject to the conditions that confront us; rather, these conditions are subject to our decision ... we must decide whether we will face up or give in, whether or not we will let ourselves be determined by the conditions.Collection: Giving
Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.Collection: Stress
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.Collection: Men
The transitoriness of our existence in now way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities.Collection: Doe
The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore—except his God.Collection: Fear
We had to learn...that it did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us.Collection: Live In The Moment
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.Collection: Men
As such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.Collection: Men
A man who could not see the end of his"provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.Collection: Men
Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.Collection: Long
No one can take from us the ability to choose our attitudes toward the circumstances in which we find ourselves. This is the last of human freedoms.Collection: Attitude
In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away. all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.Collection: Taken
It is true that we can see the therapist as a technician only if we have first viewed the patient as some sort of machine.Collection: Firsts