Top 100 Frankl's 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. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
Viktor E. Frankl
#3. 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
#4. The perception of meaning, as I see it, more specifically boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or, to express it in plain words, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.
Viktor E. Frankl
#5. In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
Viktor E. Frankl
#6. Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.
Viktor E. Frankl
#7. Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
Viktor E. Frankl
#8. Man's last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation
Viktor E. Frankl
#9. Nietzsche: "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." He
Viktor E. Frankl
#10. Frankl wondered whether "there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy - healing through reading." Frankl's
Viktor E. Frankl
#11. The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing
Viktor E. Frankl
#12. We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: 1. by doing a deed; 2. by experiencing a value; and 3. by suffering.
Viktor E. Frankl
#13. For tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only
Viktor E. Frankl
#14. 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
#15. Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.
Viktor E. Frankl
#16. If I don't get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.
Viktor E. Frankl
#17. It isn't the past which holds us back, it's the future; and how we undermine it, today.
Viktor E. Frankl
#18. When a man cannot find meaning, he numbs himself with pleasure.
Viktor E. Frankl
#19. Man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#20. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#21. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.
Viktor E. Frankl
#22. To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is rather that of an eye specialist than 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#23. Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
Viktor E. Frankl
#25. if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person's life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one's shelves.
Viktor E. Frankl
#26. Once an individual's search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering
Viktor E. Frankl
#27. 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
#28. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#29. Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
#30. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
Viktor E. Frankl
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Man's search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#34. We do not ask life what the meaning of life is. Life asks us, what is the meaning of your life. And life demands our answer.
Viktor E. Frankl
#35. And I quoted from Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
Viktor E. Frankl
#36. Viktor Frankl said the Concentration camp survivalist said no matter how much mental or physical abuse had been given nobody could cause him to think about anything he didn't want to think about
Bob Proctor
#38. 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
#39. Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
Viktor E. Frankl
#40. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our
Viktor E. Frankl
#41. I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable.
Viktor E. Frankl
#42. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
Viktor E. Frankl
#43. Life asks of every individual a contribution, and it is up to that individual to discover what it should be
Viktor E. Frankl
#44. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#45. The consciousness of one's inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?
Viktor E. Frankl
#46. No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
Viktor E. Frankl
#47. Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influences.
Viktor E. Frankl
#48. The choices humans make should be active rather than passive.
Viktor E. Frankl
#49. No matter how you really feel at the moment or what is happening in your life, resolve to remain cheerful and upbeat. As Viktor Frankl wrote in his bestselling book Man's Search for Meaning, The last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one's attitude in any given set of cricumstances.
Brian Tracy
#50. The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.
Viktor E. Frankl
#51. 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
#52. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#53. 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
#54. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? - "Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. The
Viktor E. Frankl
#55. Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death
Viktor E. Frankl
#56. Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.
Viktor E. Frankl
#57. Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
Viktor E. Frankl
#58. No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.
Viktor E. Frankl
#59. Frankl discovered that a human being's fundamental dignity lies in his capacity to choose his response to any situation - his response-ability.
Fred Kofman
#60. 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
#61. I try to do everything as soon as possible, and not at the last moment. This ensures that, when I am overburdened with work, I will not face the added pressure of knowing that something is still to be done.
Viktor E. Frankl
#62. Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.
Viktor E. Frankl
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
Viktor E. Frankl
#66. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor E. Frankl
#67. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#68. No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
Viktor E. Frankl
#69. 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
#70. Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.
Viktor E. Frankl
#71. I was horrified, but this was just as well, because step by step we had to become accustomed to a terrible and immense horror.
Viktor E. Frankl
#72. the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, he wrote about how he survived a Nazi concentration camp by creating a Why every day: a reason to live, to try - a reason not to give up. It would have been much easier to give up, Frankl noted, and most did.
Robert J. Langone
#73. 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
#74. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#75. At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.
Viktor E. Frankl
#76. Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation.
Viktor E. Frankl
#77. 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
#78. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#79. The more one forgets one's own self, the more human the person becomes.
Viktor E. Frankl
#80. 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
#81. Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.
Viktor E. Frankl
#82. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#83. The last of human freedoms - the ability to chose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.
Viktor E. Frankl
#84. There is nothing in this world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is meaning in one's life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#85. they offer sufficient proof that 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. And
Viktor E. Frankl
#86. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
Viktor E. Frankl
#87. 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
#88. Man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
Viktor E. Frankl
#89. 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
#90. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement.
Viktor E. Frankl
#91. Life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable. And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to creatively turn life's negative aspects into something positive or constructive. In other words, what matters is to make the best of any given situation.
Viktor E. Frankl
#93. To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.
Viktor E. Frankl
#94. I think Republicans need to have their staffers reading less Ayn Rand and having them read Dr. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning more.
Rob Zerban
#95. The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitudes.
Viktor E. Frankl
#96. A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
Viktor E. Frankl
#97. Our attitude towards what has happened to us in life is the important thing to recognize. Once hopeless, my life is now hope-full, but it did not happen overnight. The last of human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, is to choose one's own way.
Viktor E. Frankl
#98. The one thing you can't take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one's freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance.
Viktor E. Frankl
#99. 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
#100. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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,
Viktor E. Frankl
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