Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The wish is father to the thought” to “The fear is mother of the event.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

302. “People tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

303. “To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ 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. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

304. “There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

305. “We also do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

307. “At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world – I had but one sentence in mind – always the same: “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.” How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until I again became a human being.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

308. “A sound philosophy of life, I think, may be the most valuable asset for a psychiatrist to have when he is treating a patient.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, “How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler’s language?” In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, “How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

314. “The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

315. “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

316. “That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

317. “It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope. And what is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad inasmuch as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

318. “The kind of lesson I had in spotting propaganda has long since dropped off the school curriculum. Yet it seems the time has again come when simple truths and basic human values need defending against the dangerous tides of hatred-spewing propagandists. Is it time again to bring back civics – lessons in speaking up, being a responsible citizen, and spotting today’s Big Lies?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

319. “Lessing who once said, “There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

320. “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over his edema, by confessing, “I have wept it out of my system.” The.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

322. “It can be said that they were worthy of 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

323. “In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

324. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

325. “Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

326. “With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

327. “And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

328. “My interest does not lie in raising parrots that just rehash “their master’s voice,” but rather in passing the torch to “independent and inventive, innovative and creative spirits.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

329. “The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

330. “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

331. “It was Kierkegaard who told the wise parable that the door to happiness always opens ‘outwards’, which means it closes itself precisely against the person who tries to push the door to happiness ‘inwards’, so to speak.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

332. “Earlier, I mentioned art. Is there such a thing in a concentration camp? It rather depends on what one chooses to call art.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

333. “One may howl with the wolves, if need be, but when doing so, one should be, I would urge, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

334. “All psychotherapy is ultimately something of an art. There is always an irrational element in psychotherapy. The doctor’s artistic intuition and sensitivity is of considerable importance. The patient, too, brings an irrational element into the relationship: his individuality.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

335. “How beautiful the world could be!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

336. “Frankl wondered whether “there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy – healing through reading.” Frankl’s.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

337. “Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that 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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

338. “Nadie es conocedor de la esencia de otro ser humano si no lo ama.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

339. “To be sure, man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

340. “Tension is not something to be avoided indiscriminately. Man does not need homeostasis at any cost, but rather a sound amount of tension such as that which is aroused by the demanding quality inherent in the meaning for human existence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

341. “Just consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the young generation: there is ample empirical evidence that the three facets of this syndrome – depression, aggression, addiction – are due to what is called in logotherapy “the existential vacuum,” a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

342. “Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why – an aim – for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

343. “But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right then all our lives would be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else – preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which already seems obvious to us.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

344. “Whether a life is fulfilled does not depend on how great one’s radius of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is fully filled out.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

345. “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

346. “To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

347. “In fact, the drug scene is one aspect of a more general mass phenomenon, namely the feeling of meaninglessness resulting from a frustration of our existential needs which in turn has become a universal phenomenon in our industrial societies.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

348. “Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

349. “Which choice will be made an actuality once and forever, an immortal “footprint in the sands of time”? At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

350. “Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors – be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature?”

— Viktor E. Frankl