Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

173 quotes in 2114 categories

• It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning…
• Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
• 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…
• We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They…
• 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…
• To suffer unecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
• Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them.
• It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
• Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.
• 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…
• 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…
• In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
• Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality
• For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final…
• Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
• 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…
• 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…
• It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.
• A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits…
• 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…

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