Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

452. “If someone now asked of us the truth of Dostoevski’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything, we would reply, “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.” But our psychological investigations have not taken us that far yet; neither had we prisoners reached that point. We were still in the first phase of our psychological reactions.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

453. “A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive – that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

454. “Having shown the beneficial impact of meaning orientation, I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

455. “In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

456. “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.” “That was it, exactly,” Frankl said. “Those are the very words I had written.” WILLIAM J. WINSLADE.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

457. “Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

458. “To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

459. “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future – sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

460. “Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

461. “You are responsible for overcoming guilt by rising above it, by growing beyond yourselves, by changing for the better.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

462. “To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

463. “Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, a meaning which even included all of her sufferings. By the same token, however, it had become clear as well that a life of short duration, like that, for example, of her dead boy, could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

464. “As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

465. “A realistic fear, like the fear of death, cannot be tranquilized away by its psychodynamic interpretation; on the other hand, a neurotic fear, such as agoraphobia, cannot be cured by philosophical understanding.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

466. “Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

467. “Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

468. “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

469. “There was neither time nor desire to consider moral or ethical issues. Every man was controlled by one thought only: to keep himself alive for the family waiting for him at home, and to save his friends. With no hesitation, therefore, he would arrange for another prisoner, another “number,” to take his place in the transport.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

470. “I could not change his fate; I could not revive his wife. But in that moment I did succeed in changing his attitude toward his unalterable fate inasmuch as from that time on he could at least see a meaning in his suffering.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

471. “Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man – his courage and hope, or lack of them – and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friend’s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body’s resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

472. “Ser hombre implica dirigirse hacia algo o alguien distinto de uno mismo, bien sea para realizar un valor, bien para alcanzar un sentido o para encontrar a otro ser humano.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

473. “As a psychiatrist, Frankl avoided direct reference to his personal religious beliefs. He was fond of saying that the aim of psychiatry was the healing of the soul, leaving to religion the salvation of the soul.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

474. “Tell me Master, what is the best move in the world?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

475. “In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

476. “Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them. We had to strive to lead them back to this truth, or the consequences would have been much worse than the loss of a few thousand stalks of oats.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

477. “My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing – which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

478. “Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

479. “They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

480. “A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

481. “Times of transition are difficult times, times of crisis. But in these times of crisis, with their woes, a new time is already being born.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

482. “In particular, it is the challenge of youth to question the meaning of life. However, the courage to question should be matched by patience. People should be patient until, sooner or later, meaning dawns on them. This is what they should do, rather than taking their lives – or taking refuge in drugs.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

483. “I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

484. “For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

485. “Meaning orientation had subsided, and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

486. “Thus the illusions some of us still held were destroyed one by one, and then, quite unexpectedly, most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives. When the showers started to run, we all tried very hard to make fun, both about ourselves and about each other. After all, real water did flow from the sprays!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

487. “Just as the boomerang returns to the hunter who has thrown it, only if it has missed its target, man returns to himself, reflects upon himself and becomes over-concerned with self-interpretation only when he has missed his mission, and has been frustrated in his search for meaning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

488. “Now I continued sipping my soup. If my lack of emotion had not surprised me from the standpoint of professional interest, I would not remember this incident now, because there was so little feeling involved in it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

489. “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

490. “We have rescued it into the past wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

491. “Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

492. “Frankl’s doctrine of logotherapy, curing the soul by leading it to find meaning in life, gains credibility against the background of his anguish in Auschwitz.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

493. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

494. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

495. “Dari semua cerita tersebut, kita bisa menarik pelajaran bahwa hanya ada dua ras manusia di dunia ini, yaitu “ras baik” dan “ras buruk.” Kedua ras ini bisa ditemukan di mana pun; mereka ada dalam setiap kelompok masyarakat. Tidak ada kelompok yang hanya terdiri dari satu “ras”, yang baik atau yang buruk saja.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

496. “And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

497. “Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

498. “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 his life away.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

499. “Love is living the experience of another person in all his uniqueness and singularity.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

500. “Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative”.”

— Viktor E. Frankl