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You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me – and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!

Viktor E. Frankl

The last freedom is choosing your attitude.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Attitude Choosing Lasts
Everywhere man is confronted with fate , with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Fate Inspirational Men
It is this spiritual freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Meaningful Spiritual Taken
Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Consequences Goal Psychology Unintended
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Causes Dedication Happiness
It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Condition Meaning Men Search
Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Being Kind Perhaps Surest
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
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
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Powerful Purpose Wise
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.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Courage Grief Men
In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Fear Sacrifice Suffering
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
It said to me, ‘I am here — I am here — I am life, eternal life.’
VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Eternal Life Said
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
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

You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me – and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!

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You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me – and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!

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