Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

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 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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

458. “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. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

466. “To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that “points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself... by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to loved.“.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

475. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “It goes without saying that meaning and purpose in life cannot be prescribed like a drug. It is not the job of a doctor to give meaning to the patient’s life. But it may well be his task, through an existential analysis, to enable the patient to find meaning in life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

485. “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

486. “The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days – after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

487. “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

488. “It was the first selection, the first verdict made on our existence or non-existence. For the great majority of our transport, about 90 percent, it meant death. Their sentence was carried out within the next few hours.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

489. “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

490. “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

491. “Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors –.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

492. “Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

493. “And so we should not only remember the dead, but also forgive the living. Just as we reach out our hand to the dead, across all graves, so we reach out to the living – across all hatred. And when we say: Honored be the dead, so we should add: And peace to all the living who are of goodwill.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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