Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “No one can take from us the ability to choose our attitudes toward the circumstances in which we find ourselves. This is the last of human freedoms.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

102. “Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

103. “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

104. “Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

105. “Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

106. “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

107. “God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

108. “Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

109. “Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

110. “Life asks of every individual a contribution, and it is up to that individual to discover what it should be.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

111. “Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

112. “Our attitude towards what has happened to us in life is the important thing to recognize. Once hopeless, my life is now hope-full, but it did not happen overnight. The last of human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, is to choose one’s own way.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

113. “Once an individual’s search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

114. “Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

115. “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

116. “Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

117. “It isn’t the past which holds us back, it’s the future; and how we undermine it, today.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

118. “What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

119. “Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

120. “Nothing is likely to help a person overcome or endure troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

121. “As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

122. “There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

123. “I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

124. “Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

125. “Logotherapy bases its technique called “paradoxical intention” on the twofold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

126. “Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

127. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

128. “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

129. “Man’s last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

130. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked – and behold, duty was joy.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

131. “The pleasure principle is an artificial creation of psychology. Pleasure is not the goal of our aspirations, but the consequence of attaining them.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

132. “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

133. “The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. 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

134. “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

135. “Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in its 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

136. “No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

137. “Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. “Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete. 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. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

138. “To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

139. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

140. “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

141. “If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

142. “Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument – they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

143. “I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

144. “Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

145. “How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we many even try to predict the mechanisms or “dynamisms” of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

146. “Somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of ultimate purpose.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

147. “Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

148. “There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

149. “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. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

150. “They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.”

— Viktor E. Frankl