Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
VIKTOR E. FRANKLGod is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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The more one forgives himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.
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It is always important to have something yet to do in life.
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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.
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What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
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Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.
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Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.
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When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.
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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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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.
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I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
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The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.
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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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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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We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life.
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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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It isn’t the past which holds us back, it’s the future; and how we undermine it, today.
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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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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.
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Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
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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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Everywhere man is confronted with fate , with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
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Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
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You don’t create your mission in life – you detect it.
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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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A man who could not see the end of his”provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
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The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL