Man is able to snatch everything except one thing, the last of human freedoms: the choice of an attitude under any given set of circumstances to determine his own path.
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. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of...
Preface to the 1992 Edition of Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning: "Again and again I therefore admonish my students both in Europe and in America: 'Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going t...
Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.
Each of us has his own inner concentration camp... We must deal with, with forgiveness and patience-as full human beings, as we are and what we will become.
The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
No-one will be able to make us believe that man is a sublimated animal once we can show that within him there is a repressed angel.
If you treat people to a vision of themselves, if you apparently overrate them, you make them become what they are capable of becoming.
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 S...
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.
A life of short duration...could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.
When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into m...
The 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.
