Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

255. “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

256. “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

257. “Edith Weisskopf-Joelson observed in this context that the logotherapeutic “notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

258. “Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

259. “Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

260. “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

261. “Vivir significa asumir la responsabilidad de encontrar la respuesta correcta a los problemas que ello plantea y cumplir las tareas que la vida asigna continuamente a cada individuo.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

262. “As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

263. “What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

264. “El humor es otra de las armas del alma en su lucha por la supervivencia.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

265. “But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

266. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

267. “EL DESTINO, UN REGALO La actitud con la que un hombre acepta su destino y el sufrimiento que este conlleva, la forma en que carga con su cruz, comporta la singular coyuntura – incluso en circunstancias muy adversas – de dotar de sentido profundo a su vida. Puede conservar su valor, su dignidad, su generosidad o, arrastrado en la amarga lucha por la supervivencia, puede olvidar su dignidad humana y actuar como un animal, como sucede con los prisioneros de los campos.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

268. “The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

269. “The fear is mother of the event.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

270. “From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past – the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized – and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

271. “George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There’s no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

272. “Los hombres ilustres siempre recomienzan, y eso los convierte en admirables e imitables.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

273. “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

274. “He also believed strongly in reconciliation rather than revenge; he once remarked, “I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl