Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor E. Frankl Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Viktor E. Frankl on Wise Famous Quotes.
Man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
No-one will be able to make us believe that man is a sublimated animal once we can show that within him there is a repressed angel.
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed.
Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.
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.
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.
Though it may afford momentary psychological relief, it is an illusion which physiologically, surely, must not be without danger.
Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer [ ... ] his unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden.
Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our
Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.
A man who could not see the end of his"provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
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.
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.
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.
Think for some minutes about the meaning of life. Particularly about the meaning of the coming day and its meaning for me.
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.
I was horrified, but this was just as well, because step by step we had to become accustomed to a terrible and immense horror.
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.
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.
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.
What a man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.
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.
It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success.
A sound philosophy of life, I think, may be the most valuable asset for a psychiatrist to have when he is treating a patient.
Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the web of life.
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.
Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors -
If we take a man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be we make him capable of becoming what he can be.
So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.
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
Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.