Top 100 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
#1. He describes poignantly the prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die.
Viktor E. Frankl
#2. And as long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather
Viktor E. Frankl
#3. Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.
Viktor E. Frankl
#4. Man's last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation
Viktor E. Frankl
#5. Nietzsche: "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." He
Viktor E. Frankl
#6. The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing
Viktor E. Frankl
#7. View your life from your funeral, looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn't? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what you wouldn't
Viktor E. Frankl
#8. It isn't the past which holds us back, it's the future; and how we undermine it, today.
Viktor E. Frankl
#10. Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance - as whether one escapes or not - ultimately would not be worth living at all.
Viktor E. Frankl
#11. What matters is not the features of our character or the drives and instincts per se, but rather the stand we take toward them. And the capacity to take such a stand is what makes us human beings.
Viktor E. Frankl
#12. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
Viktor E. Frankl
#13. 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
Viktor E. Frankl
#14. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
Viktor E. Frankl
#15. The choices humans make should be active rather than passive.
Viktor E. Frankl
#16. I have known successful businessmen who, upon retirement, lost all zest for life. Their work had given their lives meaning. Often it was the only thing that had given their lives meaning and, without it, they spent day after day sitting at home, depressed, with nothing to do.
Viktor E. Frankl
#17. I mentioned earlier how everything that was not connected with the immediate task of keeping oneself and one's closest friends alive lost its value.
Viktor E. Frankl
#18. Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
Viktor E. Frankl
#19. No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.
Viktor E. Frankl
#20. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#21. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#22. Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Viktor E. Frankl
#23. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#24. It is our responsibility to look for meaning in life, even in the darkest times, and whatever the circumstances we always have a vestige of free will.
Viktor E. Frankl
#25. Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.
Viktor E. Frankl
#26. Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time - inner time - which is a result of their unemployed state.
Viktor E. Frankl
#27. A life of short duration ... could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.
Viktor E. Frankl
#29. Strangely enough, a blow which does not even find its mark can, under certain circumstance, hurt more than one that finds its mark
Viktor E. Frankl
#30. It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
Viktor E. Frankl
#31. Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find our goals and purpose in our lives that make even the worst situation worth living through.
Viktor E. Frankl
#32. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.
Viktor E. Frankl
#33. Nothing is likely to help a person overcome or endure troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#34. Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a
hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond
himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.
Viktor E. Frankl
#35. When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Viktor E. Frankl
#36. At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.
Viktor E. Frankl
#38. Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide
Viktor E. Frankl
#39. For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/ ... /, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.
Viktor E. Frankl
#41. Sports allow men to build up situations of emergency. What he then demands of himself is unnecessary achievement - and unnecessary sacrifice. He artificially creates the tension that he has been spared by affluent society.
Viktor E. Frankl
#42. It is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. Strangely
Viktor E. Frankl
#43. The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory." In
Viktor E. Frankl
#45. Every therapy must in some way, no matter how restricted, also be logotherapy.
Viktor E. Frankl
#46. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed.
Viktor E. Frankl
#47. In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.
Viktor E. Frankl
#48. Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.
Viktor E. Frankl
#49. The more one forgives himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.
Viktor E. Frankl
#50. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
Viktor E. Frankl
#51. The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.
Viktor E. Frankl
#52. We have absolutely no control over what happens to us in life but what we have paramount control over is how we respond to those events.
Viktor E. Frankl
#53. The immediate influence of behavior is always more effective than that of words.
Viktor E. Frankl
#54. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Viktor E. Frankl
#55. The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
Viktor E. Frankl
#56. It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
Viktor E. Frankl
#57. I think it was Lessing who once said, 'There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose'. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.
Viktor E. Frankl
#58. If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.
Viktor E. Frankl
#59. If hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.
Viktor E. Frankl
#60. Psychologically, what was happening to the liberated prisoners could be called "depersonalization." Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true.
Viktor E. Frankl
#62. The last of human freedoms - the ability to chose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.
Viktor E. Frankl
#63. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#64. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
Viktor E. Frankl
#65. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
Viktor E. Frankl
#66. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
Viktor E. Frankl
#67. Our greatest human freedom is that, despite whatever our physical situation is in life, WE ARE ALWAYS FREE TO CHOOSE OUR THOUGHTS!
Viktor E. Frankl
#68. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#70. Man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
Viktor E. Frankl
#71. A man's character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt.
Viktor E. Frankl
#72. Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the web of life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#74. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.
Viktor E. Frankl
#75. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future. And
Viktor E. Frankl
#77. What a man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
Viktor E. Frankl
#78. Even when it is not fully attained, we become better by striving for a higher goal.
Viktor E. Frankl
#79. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#80. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how".
Viktor E. Frankl
#81. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.
Viktor E. Frankl
#82. He yearned for privacy and for solitude. After my transportation to a so-called "rest camp," I had the rare fortune to find solitude for about five minutes at a time.
Viktor E. Frankl
#83. As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.
Viktor E. Frankl
#84. 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
Viktor E. Frankl
#85. Freedom" -- we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours.
Viktor E. Frankl
#87. Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Viktor E. Frankl
#88. 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!
Viktor E. Frankl
#89. Pain is only bearable if we know it will end, not if we deny it exists.
Viktor E. Frankl
#90. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#91. Suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. He
Viktor E. Frankl
#92. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.
Viktor E. Frankl
#93. This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past.
Viktor E. Frankl
#94. Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
Viktor E. Frankl
#95. Either belief in God is unconditional or it is no belief at all.
Viktor E. Frankl
#96. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#97. Sleep [is like] a dove which has landed near one's hand and stays there as long as one does not pay any attention to it.
Viktor E. Frankl
#98. Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.
Viktor E. Frankl
#99. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#100. It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
Viktor E. Frankl
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