Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

492. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl