Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

156. “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

157. “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

158. “Anyone can give up, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that’s true strength.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

159. “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

160. “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

161. “Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake but individuality for the human community.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

165. “The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

175. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self’s actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then 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

192. “Logos is deeper than logic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

195. “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

196. “Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

197. “The transitoriness of our existence in now way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

198. “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

199. “Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

200. “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