Success, like happiness, is the unexpected side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
VIKTOR E. FRANKLWe can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: 1. by doing a deed; 2. by experiencing a value; and 3. by suffering.
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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You don’t create your mission in life – you detect it.
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A human being is a deciding being.
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The last freedom is choosing your attitude.
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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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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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It is always important to have something yet to do in 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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I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run- in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
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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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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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The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
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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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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.”
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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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Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
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The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.
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Once an individual’s search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering
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No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
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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 inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
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As such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.
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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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Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
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But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
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The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing
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Everywhere man is confronted with fate , with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL