Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

156. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

158. “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

159. “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

160. “He who has a strong enough why will find the how.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

169. “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

170. “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

171. “Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

181. “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

182. “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

183. “Et lux in tenebris lucet – and the light shineth in the darkness.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

188. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

190. “Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

191. “Even more powerful than fate is the courage that bears it steadfastly.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

192. “Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

193. “We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles – whatever one may choose to call them – we know: the best of us did not return.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

194. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

195. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

196. “Sports allow men to build up situations of emergency. What he then demands of himself is unnecessary achievement – and unnecessary sacrifice. He artificially creates the tension that he has been spared by affluent society.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

197. “This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

198. “The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

199. “Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

200. “Logos is deeper than logic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl