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It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.

Viktor E. Frankl

I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Country Lectures Ministry Ultimately
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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Attitude Circumstances Lasts
One can choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Attitude Freedom Positive Thinking
Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Answers Life Men
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Honesty Humility Men
Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Encounters Existential Human Long
God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Intimate Partners Solliloquies
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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Mean People Struggle
At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Existence Men Moments
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. FRANKL

Believe Greatest Quests Task Taught
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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Fate Giving Meaningful
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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Challenges Country Fate Inspirational People Victim
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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Frame May Spiritual Views
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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Actualization Causes Giving Self
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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Dignity May Men Mentality Spiritual
It said to me, ‘I am here — I am here — I am life, eternal life.’
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Eternal Life Said

It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.

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It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.

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