A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
VIKTOR E. FRANKLHaving been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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It is true that we can see the therapist as a technician only if we have first viewed the patient as some sort of machine.
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What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.
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You don’t create your mission in life – you detect it.
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Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.
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Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
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Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
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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 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.
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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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View life as a series of movie frames, the ending and meaning may not be apparent until the very end of the movie, and yet, each of the hundreds of individual frames has meaning within the context of the whole movie.
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Man’s last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation
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Man’s search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.
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It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
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Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
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I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL