Man can only find meaning for his existence in something outside himself.
VIKTOR E. FRANKLView your life from your funeral, looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn’t? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what you wouldn’t
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing
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God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies
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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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Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
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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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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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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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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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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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Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
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One should not search for an abstract meaning of life … Life can be made meaningful in a threefold way: first, through what we give to life … second, by what we take from the world … third, through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change.
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It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
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There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.
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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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It is always important to have something yet to do in 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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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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It isn’t the past which holds us back, it’s the future; and how we undermine it, today.
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Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
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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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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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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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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.
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These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning in life in a general way.
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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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL