Viktor Frankl on meaning and purpose

May 5, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Frankl in 1965

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

~ Viktor Frankl

Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories. Wikipedia

Born March 26, 1905, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, Austria

Died September 2, 1997 (age 92 years), Vienna, Austria

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Quotes

“You are an individuation of infinite mind. You are an individuation of creative intuition. Being an individuation of infinite mind, you know what to do, and you will do it; you know what to say, and you will say it; you know what to write and you will write it.”
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“Under and behind the universed of time, space and change is a fundamental reality.”
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“There is only one Man (sic) in the Universe.”
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“There is no opposite sex.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“[Diabolic] comes from the Greek word diabolos; ‘diabolic’ is the term in contemporary English. Diabolos, interestingly enough, literally means ‘to tear apart’ (dia-bollein). Now it is fascinating to note that this diabolic is the antonym of ‘symbolic.’ The later comes from sym-bollein, which means ‘to throw together,’ to unite. There lie in these words tremendous implications with respect to an ontology of good and evil. The symbolic is that which draws together, ties, integrates the individual in himself and with his group; the diabolic, in contrast, is that which disintegrates and tears apart. Both of these are present in the daimonic.”
―Rollo May, Love and Will

“We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
–Tolstoy in War and Peace

“Not only is God non-anthropomorphic Consciousness, but so are we.”
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“We too are founders… We too are makers of a nation.”
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“The best values of humanity can be taught and experienced through mentorship. This includes rejoicing together (via positiva), crying together (via negativa), imagining creative solutions together (via creativa) and changing institutions (via transformativa). True mentorship can support us in resisting the barbarism of these days.”
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“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
–Octavia Butler

“I AM The Prosperos.”
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“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
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“Each person has a role, chosen or not, that he or she should strive to fulfill as perfectly and as selflessly as possible. Confusion arises when people try to fill someone else’s role, or when people neglect their role in the pursuit of some tangible result. Pay no attention to result, advises Krishna, for you humans are in no position to know the ultimate result of your actions, either for yourselves or for others. Instead, be mindful of the infinitely complex web that connects all events through all time. And focus instead on how performing your own role well can bring balance and completion to the purpose of every other being.”
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“Truth has a life wish.”
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^“How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings. They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.”
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“[T]herefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.”
–Job 42:3 (King James Version)

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
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“Things are not getting worse. They are getting uncovered.”
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“Only in my divinity am I equal to everyone else.”
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“What I am (what you are) has no limit.”
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“The souls whom one would wish to resemble like Etienne de La Boétie, for example, are always the supplest. ‘C’est estre, mais ce n’est pas vivre, que de se tenir attaché et oblige par necessité a un seul train.’“
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“Love is the best revenge.”
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“There is no anthropomorphic God. There is no anthropomorphic man.”
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“An Infinite Mind requires an Infinite Body.”
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“To understand all is to forgive all.”
–French proverb

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
–Howard Thurman

“Absurd as it sounds, masturbation is one of the highest faculties mankind has yet achieved. But its importance is in what it presages. That one day the imagination will be able to achieve this result in all fields.”
–Colin Wilson

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–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“The world owes its reality to infinite consciousness; it borrows its appearance from the finite mind.”
–Rupert Spira

“The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”
– Mohandas K. Gandhi

“We cannot go to our self by discipline or effort; we go there by love and surrender.”
–Rupert Spira

“And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God.”
–Luke 18:19 (King James version)

“Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.”
–Job 42:3

“It may be that all dreams are precognitive.”
–Eric Wargo

“When the Real Self speaks, the body listens.”
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“To begin with, we seem to be in the world, then the world seems to be in us, and finally the distinction between our self and the world dissolves.”
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“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
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“Sexuality is something you let in. It’s not something you let out.”
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“Premeditation, the time spent procrastinating before meditation.”
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“It’s not enough for a woman to be pregnant.
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–Suzanne Deakins, H.W., M.

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–D.H. Lawrence

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“The world is not here to make you happy. It’s here to make you conscious.”
–Eckhart Tolle

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
–Ernest Hemingway

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
–Vladimir Lenin

“Go fearward.”
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“Translation is the poetry of the Universe.”
–Richard Branam

“Peacocks strut around because they cannot fly.”
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“We cannot evolve any faster than we evolve our language because you cannot go to places that you cannot describe.”
–Terence McKenna

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
–Margaret Atwood

“You have to fall in love with hanging around words.”
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“Energy is primary. Personification is secondary.”
–Joseph Campbell

“Everything is connected. Everything has meaning.”
–Thane of Hawaii

“None of you knows what creativity means. To paint a picture, to write a poem? No! To recast one’s whole age, to impose upon it the stamp of one’s will, to fill it with beauty, to overwhelm it, to overpower it with one’s spirit.”
–Christian Morgenstern, German poet

“Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different … there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of view.”
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“We do not tame Truth. Truth tames us.”
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“Truth is the Law of Contradiction, rendering null and void falsidity.”
–Richard Branam

“Shift your sense of identity from the person you experience yourself to be to the awareness that is aware of that person.”
–Ben Gilberti, H.W., M.

“Falling in love is a form of mystical envisioning in which one sees the beloved as he or she is seen through the eyes of God.”
–Wikipedia on the ideas of Charles Williams

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
–Søren Kierkegaard

“One is never less alone than when alone.”
–from the movie “Into Great Silence”

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”
–from the movie “Spotlight”

“Truth is in the constant process of renewing Itself.”
–Richard Branam

“Translation is comfort food for the soul.”
–Sunday Night Translation Group

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
–Anais Nin

“I’m okay with a US Space Force. But what we need most is a Truth Force — one that defends against all enemies of accurate information, both foreign & domestic.”
–Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The ego gets what it wants with words. The soul finds what it needs in silence.”
–Richard Rohr

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
―George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Man is in love with conclusions.”
–Richard Branam

“Question: How old is being? Answer: It’s not.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Critique of one’s body without regard to the context of one’s psyche is a form of pornography.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“I am a Dictionary.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Someone with little regard for relative truth can hardly be expected to have great regard for universal truth.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Our job is to make the Universal Unconscious conscious.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Let’s undo each other.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Truth is not a zero-sum game.”
–Michael Kelly

“There is no Supreme Being. There is only Being. And we are all that Being.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“The Universe loves it when we Translate.”
–Richard Branam

“Translation is ‘magical thinking’ based on self-evident axioms and syllogistic reasoning (which is to say that Translation is not magical thinking at all).”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“You do not merely stretch rhino leather over your own fair skin, for that would deflect pleasure as well as pain, and you do not permit your being to turn stinking inside a shell, but what you do is swirl yourself in the toughness of dreams.”
–Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
–George Bernard Shaw

“Minds are like parachutes: they only function when open.”
–Thomas Dewar, First Baron Dewar (Yes, that Dewar…)

“It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
–Krishnamurti

“Belief in ego is the Antichrist.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Love is the perfume of Truth.”
–Robert McEwen, H.W., M.

“The traditional ethical precept about anger is sometimes translated as not to get angry, but in modern Soto Zen Buddhism, we say not to harbor ill will.”
–Taigen Dan Leighton.

“Anger is traditionally thought to be close to wisdom. When not projected outward onto others or inward toward the self, it gives us the necessary energy and clarity to understand what needs to be done.”
–Thanissara Mary Weinberg.

“Being has no past, no future, only the endless, beginningless Present.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Truth moves at the speed of now.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.”
– Charles Lamb

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape one hundred days of sorrow.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

“Show up. Dive in. Keep at it.”
– Barack Obama

“Give me some TRUTH!”
–Seen on a bumper sticker in Redondo Beach, CA

“At times I think and at times I am.”
–Paul Valéry

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.”
–Simone de Beauvoir

“The Cosmic Intention is to evolve from a thing to a think.”
–Melissa Goodnight, H.W., M.

“It is so respectful to not get involved in somebody else’s angst.”
–Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
–Leonard Cohen, from his song “Anthem”

“Handsome is as handsome does.”
–Proverb

“If you are not admiring a young man, you are abusing him.”
–Robert Graves

“Voting is a spiritual activity.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“[B]y man came death. [By God comes life].”
–I Corinthians 15:21

“The inner children of the past shut up when you listen to them.”
–paraphrasing Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.

“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
–R.W. Emerson

“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”
–Mother Teresa

“Loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is the richness of self.”
–May Sarton

“Nothing that you lose is real. Nothing that is real can ever be lost.”
–Al Haferkamp, H.W., M.

“Man will not be satisfied until he is everywhere equally present.”
–Al Haferkamp, H.W., M.

“Human consciousness is how the universe understands itself.”
–Joe Ciriello, H.W., m

“Gravity is a matter of interest.”
–Brian Wallenstein, H.W., d.

“There is NO gender to art.”
–Brian Wallenstein, H.W., d.

“What was once invention is now convention.”
–Brian Wallenstein, H.W., d.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, but once it gets its pants on, watch out!!!”
–Sir Winston Churchill as revised by Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
–Philo of Alexandria

“You can’t change your shoes while you’re standing in them.”
–Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.

“We think it’s the material world that survives us when we die, but without us (Consciousness) there would be no material world in the first place.”
–Mike Zonta, BB editor

“Solitude is the cure for loneliness.”
–Caroline Casey, The Visionary Activist

“A problem is basically the world telling us it’s larger than we thought it was.”
–Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.

“God is a lot more complex than we know. And a lot sexier.’
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“The conscious mind has never won an argument with the unconscious.”
–Al Haferkamp, H.W., M.

“Do you know what Theodore Roosevelt said about hunting grizzly bears? The thrill is in overcoming your own fear.”
— Cool Lester Smooth from “The Wire”

“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
–Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus of Locri (420–380 BCE)

“All real living is meeting.”
–Martin Buber

“If you knew all this shit [philosophy], you’d be unfuckwithable.”
–22-year-old student of philosophy

“If it’s an essential mission, God sends a team.”
–Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.

“I don’t live in a physical world. I live in a world that acts physical.”
–Roland Campos

“Handsome is a sort of kindness.”
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“My experiences are temporary, but Truth is eternal”.
–Bulent Tokgoz

“It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.”
–Buddha

“Translation [and Releasing the Hidden Splendour] is a form of worship.”
–Melissa Derfler and the online FYL group

“Never think of results, just do!”
–Gurdjieff

“The ear longs to hear what the heart already knows.”
–Anonymous

“Occupy Yourself!”
–David Wilcox

“Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.”
–Raaj Sharma

“Curb your God.”
–bumper sticker

“When I create art, it’s like holding hands with God.”
–Robert Mapplethorpe

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will truly know peace.”
–Sri Chinmoy Ghose

“I’m the one that has to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”
–Jimi Hendrix

“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
–Mark Twain

“My heart is like a toilet door! There are names marked all over it.”
–from the French film “Toi and Moi”.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
–Mark Twain

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
–Henry David Thoreau

“The mind loves truth and so does the body.”
–Christine

“I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”
–Aldous Huxley

“There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.”
— Chandogya Upanishad

“Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.”
–Soren Kierkegaard

“My life is not mine.”
–Rumi

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
–William S. Burroughs

“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.”
–Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Love? What is it? Most natural pain killer what there is. LOVE.”
–William S. Burrough’s final journal entry

“We acquire the strength we have overcome.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I am all other men.”
–Schopenhauer

“Man is, that he might have joy.”
–Joseph Smith

“To the man who can perfectly practice inaction, all things are possible.”
–Ernest Holmes in Science of Mind

“People will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you make them feel.”
–Tom Asacker

“We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from God, but the right to know that.”
— J.M. Barrie in Tommy and Grizel

“If you don’t believe in something greater than yourself, you’ll never do anything greater than yourself.”
–nun on Oprah

“Boredom is the child of self-centeredness.”
–The Grand Lizard Andrews

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson

“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that your life could have been any different.”
–Oprah

“When I was born I was so surprised I didn’t talk for a year and a half.”
–Gracie Allen

“Don’t look at me like I’ve gotten old or something like that.”
–Clint Eastwood

“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
–Martin Luther King Jr.

“Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away”
–Robert Fulghum

“I REFUSE to participate in a recession.”
–bumper sticker

“We believe . . . different from Wall Street. We believe customer No. 1, employee No. 2, and shareholder No. 3. This is my religion.”
–Jack Ma, Alibaba Group

“Fear is a choice.”
–Kurtis Matthews, San Francisco Comedy College

“Don’t Believe Everything You Think”
–bumper sticker

“One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
–Joseph Campbell

“When people asked [Jacques Cousteau], ‘Well, Captain, what do you expect to find?’ he always said, ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t go.’”
–Jean-Michel Cousteau, his son

“Let life happen to you. Life is in the right, always.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke

“And, as [Picasso] said, at the end of his life, he was in dialogue with the old masters, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens. He thought he was talking to them and that they were talking back to him through his art.”
–Gary Tinterow, The Met, New York

“The world breaks everyone but afterwards many are strong at the broken places.”
–Ernest Hemingway

“Inside every head is a different world.”
–skateboarder in San Francisco

“Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.”
–Christopher Fry

“If you’re neurotic and you think, I’m not where I deserve to be or my mother didn’t love me, or blah, blah, blah, that lie, that neurotic vision, takes over your life and you’re plagued by it ’til it’s cleansed. In a play, at the end of the play, the lie is revealed. [T]he better the play is, the more surprising and inevitable the lie is, as Aristotle told us. Plays are about lies.”
–David Mamet

“If you want to be a writer, you don’t want to live in a comfortable place.”
–Benjamin Alire Saenz

“And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
–Anais Nin

“Often people think that it’s a question of adrenaline, [that] it’s an adrenaline addiction. I think what they are addicted to essentially is brotherhood. It’s a very healthy impulse that is taking place in a very unhealthy place.”
–Sebastian Junger on troops in combat

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
–William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Love well, be loved and do something of value.”
–Aristotle

“Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.”
–James Cameron quoting Brazilian tribal saying

“You don’t attract what you want. You attract what you are.”
–Wayne Dyer

“We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in.”
–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

“Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.”
–J.D. Salinger

“If things don’t seem out of control, you’re not going fast enough.”
— Mario Andretti

“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”
— Anais Nin

“A change in the weather is sufficient to re-create the world and ourselves.”
— Marcel Proust

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“. . . the only difference between you and God is that you have forgotten that you are divine.”
— Peter Solomon in The Lost Symbol

“Have an open-mind, but don’t let your brains fall out.”
— Jacob Needleman

“When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
— Jacob Needleman in his new book What is God?

“A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.”
— G.K. Chesterton

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe

“Give thanks to unknown blessings already on their way.”
— Native American proverb at cafe in San Francisco

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e.e. cummings

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Bathtub Bulletin

Viktor Frankl on meaning and purpose

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

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Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more