Top 500 Viktor E. Frankl Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “The only exceptions to this were those who had lost the will to live and wanted to “enjoy” their last days. Thus, when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “Se necesitaba tiempo y paciencia para que estos hombres aceptasen la lisa y llana verdad de que nadie tiene derecho a hacer el mal, aunque se haya sufrido una atroz injusticia.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

413. “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

414. “And just as the animal is at times misled by the vital instincts, so may man go astray... whereas the ethical instinct alone enables him to discover the unique requirement of a unique situation.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

415. “Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

419. “Notably, he renounced the idea of collective guilt. Frankl was able to accept that his Viennese colleagues and neighbors may have known about or even participated in his persecution, and he did not condemn them for failing to join the resistance or die heroic deaths. Instead, he was deeply committed to the idea that even a vile Nazi criminal or a seemingly hopeless madman has the potential to transcend evil or insanity by making responsible choices.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

420. “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

421. “It goes without saying that meaning and purpose in life cannot be prescribed like a drug. It is not the job of a doctor to give meaning to the patient’s life. But it may well be his task, through an existential analysis, to enable the patient to find meaning in life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “Let us consider, for instance, “Sunday neurosis,” that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest. Not a few cases of suicide can be traced back to this existential vacuum.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

433. “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

434. “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

435. “Having shown the beneficial impact of meaning orientation, I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

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

— Viktor E. Frankl

438. “One may demand heroism only of a single person and that is oneself.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

439. “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

440. “Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

441. “The choices humans make should be active rather than passive.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “Tell me Master, what is the best move in the world?”

— Viktor E. Frankl