Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
VIKTOR E. FRANKLWhat was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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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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Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.
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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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Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it – likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.
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If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
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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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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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In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
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What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.
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Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
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The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing
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I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
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The struggle for existence is a struggle ‘for’ something; it is purposeful and only in so being is it meaningful and able to bring meaning into life.
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Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy.
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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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL