Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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2. “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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3. “Everything can be taken from a person 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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

Featured in: Life Quotes, Attitude Quotes, Positive Motivational Quotes, Life Lessons Quotes, Choices Quotes

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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5. “What is to give light must endure burning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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6. “Between stimulus and response is the freedom to choose.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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8. “It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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9. “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!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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10. “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

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11. “Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find our goals and purpose in our lives that make even the worst situation worth living through.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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12. “No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

Featured in: Perspective Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Freedom Quotes

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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14. “Man’s search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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15. “Despair is suffering without meaning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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16. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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18. “The meaning of my life is to help others find meaning in theirs.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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19. “Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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20. “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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21. “What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

23. “The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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24. “Pain from problems and disappointments, etc., is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice determined by whether you choose to compare your experience and pain to something better and therefore feel unlucky and bitter or to something worse and therefore feel lucky and grateful!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

25. “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Sad Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes, Suffering Quotes

26. “In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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27. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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28. “If we take a man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be we make him capable of becoming what he can be.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

29. “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

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30. “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

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31. “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

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32. “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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33. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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34. “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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35. “When man can’t find meaning in his life, he distracts himself with pleasure.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

36. “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

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37. “The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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38. “The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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39. “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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40. “View your life from your funeral, looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn’t? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what you wouldn’t.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

41. “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

42. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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43. “Self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself, but only as a side effect of self-transcendence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

44. “The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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45. “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how”.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

46. “Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

47. “Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

48. “Pain is only bearable if we know it will end, not if we deny it exists.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

49. “There are two races of men in this world but only these two: the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

50. “For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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