Viktor Frankl Quotes

“A human being is a deciding being.”

“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.”

“As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.”

“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.”

“The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.”

“The last of human freedoms—the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”

“To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

“When a man cannot find meaning, he numbs himself with pleasure.”

“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”

“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.”

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

“Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.”

“The meaning of life is to give life meaning.”

“What is to give light must endure burning.”

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. 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.”

“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.”

“Fear makes come true that which one is afraid of.”

“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”

“I do not forget any good deed done to me and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.”

“I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsablity on the West Coast.”

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

“It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.”

“Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”

“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”

“Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”

“Man is originally characterized by his 'search for meaning' rather than his 'search for himself'. The more he forgets himself — giving himself to a cause or another person — the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.”

“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”