Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “There were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

212. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

219. “If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

220. “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

221. “One can choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

222. “There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

223. “Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

224. “God is the partner of our most intimate soliloquies. That is to say, whenever you are talking to yourself in utmost sincerity and ultimate solitude – he to whom you are addressing yourself may justifiably be called God.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

225. “Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp’s degenerating influences.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

226. “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. 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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

227. “When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

228. “The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

229. “Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

230. “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

231. “For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

232. “Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

233. “It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

234. “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

235. “To be sure, man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

236. “Hitler had argued that people would believe anything if it was repeated often enough and if disconfirming information was routinely denied, silenced, or disputed with yet more lies.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

237. “To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances – because life itself is – but it is also possible under all circumstances.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

238. “The immediate influence of behavior is always more effective than that of words.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

239. “A positive attitude enables a person to endure suffering and disappointment as well as enhance enjoyment and satisfaction.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

240. “On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. 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

241. “Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

242. “Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after 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. It can be said that they were worthy of the their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

243. “There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one’s work or enjoy one’s life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. In other words, life’s meaning is an unconditional one, for it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

244. “In another timely insight, Frankl saw that a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are “guzzling away” without any thought of morality.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

245. “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

246. “The destiny a person suffers therefore has a twofold meaning: to be shaped where possible, and to be endured where necessary.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

247. “In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

248. “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” It seems to me that there is nothing which would.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

250. “If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor – or maybe because of it – we were carried away by nature’s beauty.”

— Viktor E. Frankl