Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for!”

— Viktor E. Frankl

405. “In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

406. “In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

407. “Frankl’s doctrine of logotherapy, curing the soul by leading it to find meaning in life, gains credibility against the background of his anguish in Auschwitz.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

408. “I generally answered all kinds of questions truthfully. But I was silent about anything that was not expressly asked for.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

409. “Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

410. “We had literally lost the ability to feel pleased and had to relearn it slowly. Psychologically, what was happening to the liberated prisoners could be called “depersonalization.” Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

411. “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

412. “Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

413. “Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing – which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

418. “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

419. “How can we dare to predict the behavior of man?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

420. “In particular, it is the challenge of youth to question the meaning of life. However, the courage to question should be matched by patience. People should be patient until, sooner or later, meaning dawns on them. This is what they should do, rather than taking their lives – or taking refuge in drugs.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

421. “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

422. “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

423. “For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

424. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

425. “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

426. “The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days – after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

427. “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.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

428. “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

429. “Apart from that strange kind of humor, another sensation seized us: curiosity. I have experienced this kind of curiosity before, as a fundamental reaction toward certain strange circumstances. When my life was once endangered by a climbing accident, I felt only one sensation at the critical moment: curiosity, curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive or with a fractured skull or some other injuries.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

430. “It was the first selection, the first verdict made on our existence or non-existence. For the great majority of our transport, about 90 percent, it meant death. Their sentence was carried out within the next few hours.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

431. “Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors –.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

432. “Apart from that strange kind of humor, another sensation seized us: curiosity.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

433. “To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

434. “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 tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

435. “Kami benci kalau harus bercerita tentang pengalaman kami. Tidak ada penjelasan yang perlu diberikan untuk mereka yang pernah menjalaninya, dan mereka yang tidak langsung merasakannya tidak akan pernah memahami bagaimana perasaan kami saat itu dan perasaan kami sekarang.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

436. “Et lux in tenebris lucet.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

437. “Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, a meaning which even included all of her sufferings. By the same token, however, it had become clear as well that a life of short duration, like that, for example, of her dead boy, could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

438. “It insists that life is meaningful and that we must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances. It emphasizes that there is an ultimate purpose to life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

439. “Frank! would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

440. “Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand. When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

441. “The choices humans makes should be active rather than passive. In making personal choices we affirm our autonomy. “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other,” Frankl writes, b”but man is ultimately self determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made of himself.“.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

442. “To attempt a methodical presentation of the subject is very difficult, as psychology requires a certain scientific detachment. But does a man who makes his observations while he himself is a prisoner possess the necessary detachment? Such detachment is granted to the outsider, but he is too far removed to make any statements of real value.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

443. “A human being, it is true, is a finite being. However, to the extent to which he understands his finiteness, he also overcomes it.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

444. “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 right conduct.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

445. “Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

446. “When we are no longer able to change a situation.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

447. “Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

448. “Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

449. “If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

450. “They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.”

— Viktor E. Frankl