Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

452. “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

453. “One may demand heroism only of a single person and that is oneself.”

— 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. “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

457. “More and more, a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems, rather than neurotic symptoms. Some of the people who nowadays call upon a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest, or rabbi in former days. Now they often refuse to be handed over to a clergyman, and instead confront the doctor with questions such as: “What is the meaning of my life?“.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

458. “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

459. “You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

461. “Those who have not gone through a similar experience can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental conflict and clashes of will power which a famished man experiences.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

473. “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

474. “It is very difficult for an outsider to grasp how very little value was placed on human life in camp. The camp inmate was hardened, but possibly became more conscious of this complete disregard of human existence when a convoy of sick men was arranged.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

475. “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

476. “It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

477. “If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

478. “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

479. “I generally answered all kinds of questions truthfully. But I was silent about anything that was not expressly asked for.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

480. “Tension, striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal are positive; trying to close the gap between what one is and what one should become.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

481. “Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

482. “Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

484. “We had literally lost the ability to feel pleased and had to relearn it slowly. Psychologically, what was happening to the liberated prisoners could be called “depersonalization.” Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

485. “Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: 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 life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

486. “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

487. “I was horrified, but this was just as well, because step by step we had to become accustomed to a terrible and immense horror.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

488. “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

489. “However, when a patient stands on the firm ground of religious belief, there can be no objection to making use of the therapeutic effect of his religious convictions and thereby drawing upon his spiritual resources.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

493. “More and more, a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

494. “Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl