Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

154. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

156. “There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

157. “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

158. “The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore – except his God.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

159. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

161. “Their question was, “Will we survive the camp? For, if not, all this suffering has no meaning.” The question which beset me was, “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning”. For, if not, the ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance-as whether one escapes or not-ultimately would not be worth living at all.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

162. “In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

163. “Ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man... 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. Logos is deeper than logic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

164. “One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

165. “Et lux in tenebris lucet.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

166. “But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

167. “Edith Weisskopf-Joelson, before her death professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, contended, in her article on logotherapy, that “our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

168. “Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the web of life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

169. “Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

170. “But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

Featured in: Real Quotes

171. “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

172. “I try to do everything as soon as possible, and not at the last moment. This ensures that, when I am overburdened with work, I will not face the added pressure of knowing that something is still to be done.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

173. “Logos is deeper than logic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

174. “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes-within the limits of endowment and environment-he has made out of himself.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

175. “Every therapy must in some way, no matter how restricted, also be logotherapy.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

176. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

177. “Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

178. “To suffer unecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

179. “A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

180. “It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to those questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

181. “For in every case man retains the freedom and the possibility of deciding for or against the influence of his surroundings.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

182. “They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly – not miserably – knowing how to die.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

183. “I have known successful businessmen who, upon retirement, lost all zest for life. Their work had given their lives meaning. Often it was the only thing that had given their lives meaning and, without it, they spent day after day sitting at home, depressed, “with nothing to do.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

184. “To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. 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

185. “Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

186. “Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

187. “I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

188. “Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insuffcient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

189. “As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

190. “In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

191. “Let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering, provided certainly that the suffering is unavoidable. 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

192. “Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which a man can aspire. The salvation of man is through love and in love...”

— Viktor E. Frankl

193. “This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

194. “Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness, unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

195. “What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? – “Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

196. “It said to me, ‘I am here – I am here – I am life, eternal life.’”

— Viktor E. Frankl

197. “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 in life in a general way.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

Featured in: Meaning of Life Quotes

198. “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

199. “Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner’s psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

200. “No one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them.”

— Viktor E. Frankl