Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
VIKTOR E. FRANKLView 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
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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The salvation of man is through love and in love.
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Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
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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.
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The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing
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Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.
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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 of endowment and environment-he has made out of himself.
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Despair is suffering without meaning.
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It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.
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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.
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In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
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Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
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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.
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The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.
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Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
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You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me – and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!
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Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.
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We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life.
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The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.
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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 ones attitude in any given circumstance.
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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.
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A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
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…to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
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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.
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It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
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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.
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I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL