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.
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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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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Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
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The last freedom is choosing your attitude.
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Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him-mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.
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No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.
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Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
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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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The salvation of man is through love and in love.
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Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy.
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We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: 1. by doing a deed; 2. by experiencing a value; and 3. by suffering.
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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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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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View 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
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The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing
VIKTOR E. FRANKL