Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

457. “Frankl writes that a person “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.” He concedes that only a few prisoners of the Nazis were able to do the former, “but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

466. “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

467. “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

468. “In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

469. “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

470. “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

471. “Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why – an aim – for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, “I have nothing to expect from life any more.” What sort of answer can one give to that?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

472. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

474. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

476. “The choices humans make should be active rather than passive.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

480. “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

481. “Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not really feel anymore. The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such common place sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him anymore.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

483. “Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

485. “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

486. “He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to call a Mephistophelean being, a satanic figure.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

487. “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

488. “Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

489. “When we are no longer able to change a situation.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

490. “If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

491. “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

492. “His approach to psychotherapy stressed the importance of helping people to reach new heights of personal meaning through self-transcendence: the application of positive effort, technique, acceptance of limitations, and wise decisions. His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

493. “So if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

494. “But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

495. “An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, “How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler’s language?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

497. “What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

498. “Seorang manusia yang menyadari tanggung jawabnya terhadap manusia lain yang menunggunya dengan kasih sayang, atau tanggung jawabnya terhadap pekerjaan yang belum selesai, tidak akan pernah bisa mengabaikan hidupnya. Dia tahu “mengapa” ia hidup, dan akan mampu menghadapi “bagaimana” dalam bentuk apa pun.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

499. “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

500. “E de-a dreptul ciudat ca, uneori, o lovitura care nici macar nu lasa vreo urma poate durea mai tare decat una care lasa urme.”

— Viktor E. Frankl