Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

252. “To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismarck could be applied: “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

253. “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

254. “Strangely enough, a blow which does not even find its mark can, under certain circumstance, hurt more than one that finds its mark.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

255. “He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest – and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

256. “Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time – inner time – which is a result of their unemployed state.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

257. “We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

258. “A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient’s existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

259. “The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

260. “Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society – all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

261. “Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

262. “Psychologically, what was happening to the liberated prisoners could be called “depersonalization.” Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

263. “At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

264. “Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepet meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

265. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

266. “Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

267. “Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man – his courage and hope, or lack of them – and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

268. “Those things which seem to take meaning away from human life include not only suffering but dying as well. I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

269. “I think it was Lessing who once said, ‘There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose’. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour”.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

270. “Months later, after liberation, I met a friend from the old camp. He related to me how he, as camp policeman, had searched for a piece of human flesh that was missing from a pile of corpses. He confiscated it from a pot in which he found it cooking. Cannibalism had broken out. I had left just in time.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

271. “We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

272. “My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

273. “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

274. “Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

275. “Apart from the moral deformity resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure, there were two other fundamental experiences which threatened to damage the character of the liberated prisoner: bitterness and disillusionment when he returned to his former life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

276. “Freedom” – we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

277. “It is true that we can see the therapist as a technician only if we have first viewed the patient as some sort of machine.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

278. “The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

279. “To be sure, the term, will to power, was coined by Nietzsche rather than Adler, and the term, will to pleasure – standing for Freud’s pleasure principle – is my own and not Freud’s.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

280. “Another statistical survey, of 7,948 students at forty-eight colleges, was conducted by social scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Their preliminary report is part of a two-year study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. Asked what they considered “very important” to them now, 16 percent of the students checked “making a lot of money”; 78 percent said their first goal was “finding a purpose and meaning to my life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

281. “Of course, this was no therapy in the proper sense since, first, his despair was no disease; and second, I could not change his fate; I could not revive his wife. But in that moment I did succeed in changing his attitude toward his unalterable fate inasmuch as from that time on he could at least see a meaning in his suffering.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

282. “Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

283. “The wish is father to the thought” to “The fear is mother of the event.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

284. “Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

285. “Suffering is intended to guard man from apathy, from psychic rigor mortis.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

286. “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

287. “As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

289. “The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading” so that “he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

290. “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. 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

291. “Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

292. “A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

293. “Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

294. “Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

295. “In contrast to most of the existentialist schools of thought, logotherapy is in no way pessimistic; but it is realistic in that it faces the tragic triad of human existence: pain, death, and guilt.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

296. “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

297. “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. Even we psychiatrists expect the reactions of a man to an abnormal situation, such as being committed to an asylum, to be abnormal in proportion to the degree of his normality.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

298. “I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

299. “He describes poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. By contrast, Frankl kept himself alive and kept hope alive by summoning up thoughts of his wife and the prospect of seeing her again, and by dreaming at one point of lecturing after the war about the psychological lessons to be learned from the Auschwitz experience.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

300. “We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves.”

— Viktor E. Frankl