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. FRANKLThe 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.
More Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
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Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
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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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…to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
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Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
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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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The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.
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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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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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Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.
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One can choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
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Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
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God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies
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In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
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We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life.
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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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A human being is a deciding being.
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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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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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It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
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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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Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
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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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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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It is always important to have something yet to do in life.
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In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
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The last freedom is choosing your attitude.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL