Great Quotes from Viktor Frankl
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of the logotherapy method and is most notable for his best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation we are challenged to change ourselves.”
“Everything could be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
“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.”
“Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he’s also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Israel on his lips.”
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
“When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.”
“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
“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.”
“So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
“The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, 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.”
“If there is any meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”
“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment the demand fulfilment therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.”
“The more one forgets 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.”
“I do not forget any good deed done to me and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.”
“A human being is a deciding being.”
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”
“The one thing you can take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me.”
