Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

355. “Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” He.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

356. “Man is that being which invented the gas chambers; but he is at the same time that being which walked with head held high into these very same gas chambers, the Lord’s Prayer or the Jewish prayer for the dead on his lips.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

357. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.” Is this to say that suffering is indispensable to the discovery of meaning? In no way. I only insist that meaning is available in spite of – nay, even through – suffering, provided, as noted in Part Two of this book, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

362. “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

363. “Whereupon I react by reporting that in the first place I do not at all see in the bestseller status of my book an achievement and accomplishment on my part but rather an expression of the misery of our time: of hundreds of thousands of people reach out firma book whose very title promises to deal with the questions of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

364. “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

366. “Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

367. “A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

368. “He describes poignantly the prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

369. “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

370. “Insofar as a sacrifice is “calculated,” performed after careful reckoning of the prospects of its bringing about a desired end, it loses all ethical significance. Real sacrifice occurs only when we run the risk of having sacrificed in vein. Would anyone maintain that a person who plunges into the water to save someone has acted less ethically, or unethically, because both are drowned?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

371. “Gordon W. Allport’s book, The Individual and His Religion: “The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

372. “Though it may afford momentary psychological relief, it is an illusion which physiologically, surely, must not be without danger.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

373. “It is the nature of love that makes us see our loved one in their uniqueness and individuality.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

374. “Tenemos que dejar de hacernos preguntas sobre el significado de la vida y, en vez de ello, pensar en nosotros como en seres a quienes la vida les inquiriera continua e incesantemente.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

375. “No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

376. “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

377. “By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

378. “Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

379. “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

380. “Tilly must have been among them.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future – sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

385. “I have nothing to expect from life any more.” What sort of answer can one give to that?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

386. “Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

387. “We are reminded again of that remark of Goethe’s which we have already quoted, and which we called the finest maxim for any kind of psychotherapy: “If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

388. “Finally, Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counseling situations: Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

389. “Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

390. “He yearned for privacy and for solitude. After my transportation to a so-called “rest camp,” I had the rare fortune to find solitude for about five minutes at a time.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

391. “Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

392. “In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is “the last of human freedoms” – the ability to “choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

393. “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

394. “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

395. “We all said to each other in camp that there could be no earthly happiness which could compensate for all we had suffered. We were not hoping for happiness – it was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet were not prepared for unhappiness.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

396. “In qualche modo, la sofferenza cessa di essere tale nel momento in cui trova un significato, come il significato di un sacrificio.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

397. “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

398. “There was neither time nor desire to consider moral or ethical issues. Every man was controlled by one thought only: to keep himself alive for the family waiting for him at home, and to save his friends. With no hesitation, therefore, he would arrange for another prisoner, another “number,” to take his place in the transport.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

399. “What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

400. “If you could learn from me how to do a brain surgery in as short a time as I am learning this roadwork, I would have great respect for you.”

— Viktor E. Frankl