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. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

452. “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

453. “In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

454. “And just as the animal is at times misled by the vital instincts, so may man go astray... whereas the ethical instinct alone enables him to discover the unique requirement of a unique situation.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

455. “Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

456. “Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

457. “If you want to stay alive, there is only one way: look fit for work. If you even limp, because, let us say, you have a small blister on your heel, and an SS man spots this, he will wave you aside and the next day you are sure to be gassed.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

458. “Apart from that strange kind of humor, another sensation seized us: curiosity.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

459. “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

460. “Freedom is not something we “have” and therefore can lose; freedom is what we “are.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

461. “Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

462. “Notably, he renounced the idea of collective guilt. Frankl was able to accept that his Viennese colleagues and neighbors may have known about or even participated in his persecution, and he did not condemn them for failing to join the resistance or die heroic deaths. Instead, he was deeply committed to the idea that even a vile Nazi criminal or a seemingly hopeless madman has the potential to transcend evil or insanity by making responsible choices.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

463. “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

464. “The fear of sleeplessness12 results in a hyper-intention to fall asleep, which, in turn, incapacitates the patient to do so. To overcome this particular fear, I usually advise the patient not to try to sleep but rather to try to do just the opposite, that is, to stay awake as long as possible.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

465. “Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

470. “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

471. “Finally, Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counseling situations: 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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “Who can throw a stone at a man who favors his friends under circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life or death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

481. “Frank! would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

482. “The choices humans makes should be active rather than passive. In making personal choices we affirm our autonomy. “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other,” Frankl writes, b”but man is ultimately self determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made of himself.“.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

483. “When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

484. “To escape into the mass is to disburden oneself of individual responsibility. As soon as someone acts as if her were a mere part of the whole, and as if only this whole counts, he can enjoy the sensation of throwing off some of the burden of his responsibility. This tendency to flee from responsibility is the motif of all collectivism. True community is in essence the community of of responsible persons; mere mass is the sum of depersonalized entities.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

485. “How can we dare to predict the behavior of man?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

486. “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

488. “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

489. “These values, however, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level – they are something that we are.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

496. “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

497. “Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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