Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive – that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

355. “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

356. “At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most, it is the mental agony caused by injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. Do.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

365. “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

366. “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

367. “Ada cukup banyak penderitaan yang harus kita jalani. Karenanya, kita perlu menghadapi seluruh penderitaan kita, dan berusaha meminimalkan perasaan lemah dan takut. Namun, kita juga tidak perlu malu untuk menangis, karena air mata merupakan saksi dari keberanian manusia yang paling besar, yakni keberanian untuk menderita.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

368. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

371. “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

372. “Thus the illusions some of us still held were destroyed one by one, and then, quite unexpectedly, most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives. When the showers started to run, we all tried very hard to make fun, both about ourselves and about each other. After all, real water did flow from the sprays!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

373. “This was enough to incapacitate the patient for the peak experience of sexual pleasure, since the orgasm was made an object of intention, and an object of attention as well, instead of remaining an unintended effect of unreflected dedication and surrender to the partner.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

374. “Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes. This excessive intention, or “hyper-intention,” as I call it, can be observed particularly in cases of sexual neurosis.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

375. “In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

376. “During psychoanalysis, the patient must lie down on a couch and tell you things which sometimes are very disagreeable to tell.” Whereupon I immediately retorted with the following improvisation: “Now, in logotherapy the patient may remain sitting erect but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

377. “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

378. “I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

379. “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

380. “Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

382. “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. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

383. “Tilly must have been among them.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

384. “To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

385. “In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

386. “A statement once made by Edith Weisskopf-Joelson: “Although traditional psychotherapy has insisted that therapeutic practices have to be based on findings on etiology, it is possible that certain factors might cause neuroses during early childhood and that entirely different factors might relieve neuroses during adulthood.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

388. “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

389. “Logos is a Greek word which denotes “meaning”.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

390. “Those who have not gone through a similar experience can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental conflict and clashes of will power which a famished man experiences.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

391. “Frankl writes that a person “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.” He concedes that only a few prisoners of the Nazis were able to do the former, “but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

392. “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

393. “As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. 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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

394. “His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

395. “A realistic fear, like the fear of death, cannot be tranquilized away by its psychodynamic interpretation; on the other hand, a neurotic fear, such as agoraphobia, cannot be cured by philosophical understanding.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

396. “These values, however, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level – they are something that we are.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

397. “If you want to stay alive, there is only one way: look fit for work. If you even limp, because, let us say, you have a small blister on your heel, and an SS man spots this, he will wave you aside and the next day you are sure to be gassed.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

398. “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

399. “Ser hombre implica dirigirse hacia algo o alguien distinto de uno mismo, bien sea para realizar un valor, bien para alcanzar un sentido o para encontrar a otro ser humano.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

400. “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