VIKTOR FRANKL QUOTATIONS FROM MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can 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.
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.
What is to give light must endure burning.
"Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it."
--Spinoza, from his Ethics, quoted by Viktor Frankl
"He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how".
--Nietzsche, quoted by Viktor Frankl
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 needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead 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.
Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying.
The salvation of man is through love and in love.
The salvation of man is through love and in love.
--Viktor Frankl