In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
VIKTOR E. FRANKLHappiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
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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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As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
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Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
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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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Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
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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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Despair is suffering without meaning.
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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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I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones.
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A human being is a deciding being.
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Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them.
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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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Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
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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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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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The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me.
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Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
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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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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.
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Ultimately, we are not subject to the conditions that confront us; rather, these conditions are subject to our decision … we must decide whether we will face up or give in, whether or not we will let ourselves be determined by the conditions.
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The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.
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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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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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Everywhere man is confronted with fate , with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL