Viktor E. Frankl quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations 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.

Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.

The immediate influence of behavior is always more effective than that of words.

He who knows the 'Why' for his existence is able to bear almost any 'How'.

The choices humans make should be active rather than passive.

The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory." In

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

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.

It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.

The meaning of my life is to help others find meaning in theirs.

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.

Every therapy must in some way, no matter how restricted, also be logotherapy.

The last freedom is choosing your attitude.

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed.

Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

Man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.

The fear is mother of the event.

The most painful part of the beatings is the insult which they imply.

God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies

Pain is only bearable if we know it will end, not if we deny it exists.

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.

Between stimulus and response is the freedom to choose.

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.

No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our

When a man cannot find meaning, he numbs himself with pleasure.

I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.

I do not forget any good deed done to me & I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.

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.

Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.

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.

Faith is trust in ultimate meaning.

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.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

I was horrified, but this was just as well, because step by step we had to become accustomed to a terrible and immense horror.

Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths.

Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

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 has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.

To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.

And I quoted from Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

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.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.

Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.

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.

Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation.

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life.

The more one forgets one's own self, the more human the person becomes.

They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.

If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

Happiness must ensue. It cannot be pursued

When we are not any lengthier capable to alter a predicament, we're challenged to alter ourselves

Ultimate freedom is a man's right to choose his attitude.

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.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.

No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.

Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors -

Fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes

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!

Success is total self-acceptance ...

Fear makes come true that which one is afraid of.

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.

Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.

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

If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.

Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.

It isn't the past which holds us back, it's the future; and how we undermine it, today.

Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

Religion is the search for ultimate meaning.