Viktor Frankl
Austrian psychiatrist, founder of logotherapy and Holocaust survivor, 1905-1997
29 quotes.
Quotes by Viktor Frankl
- 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.
- Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.
- Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.
- Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. 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.
- 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.
- Even when it is not fully attained, we become better by striving for a higher goal.
- Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life… Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
- 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.
- Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
- If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.
- If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
- Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
- 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. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.
- Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.
- Nothing is likely to help a person overcome or endure troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life.
- Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.
- Our greatest human freedom is that, despite whatever our physical situation is in life, WE ARE ALWAYS FREE TO CHOOSE OUR THOUGHTS!
- Success, like happiness, is the unexpected side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
- Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.
- The one thing you can't take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me.
- The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.
- The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.
- 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.
- This is the core of the human spirit ... If we can find something to live for - if we can find some meaning to put at the center of our lives - even the worst kind of suffering becomes bearable.
- Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.
- What is to give light must endure burning.
- What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
- When a man can’t find meaning, he distracts himself with pleasure.
- When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.