Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
VIKTOR E. FRANKLBut 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.
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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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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Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
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Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
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I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones.
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Man’s search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.
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The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
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There are two races of men in this world but only these two: the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man.
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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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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 not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
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Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
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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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Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in its spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
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Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.
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The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading” so that “he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.
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The salvation of man is through love and in love.
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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.
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Success, like happiness, is the unexpected side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
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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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When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.
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The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.
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As such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.
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Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the web of life.
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No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
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One can choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
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Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
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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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL