Jul 28, 2023 (marympembee.medium.com)
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how — Friedrich Nietzsche
Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist, neurologist, and Holocaust survivor. He is best known for his influential book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which explores his experiences in concentration camps and the importance of finding purpose and meaning of life.
Here are my best 100 quotes from his book:
1. If a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person’s life, that alone justifies reading and re-reading it and finding room for it on one’s shelves. This book has several such passages.
2. 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.
3. Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
4. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
5. The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed.
6. Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
7. We were unable to clean our teeth, and yet, in spite of that and a severe vitamin deficiency, we had healthier gums than ever before.
8. If someone now asked of us the truth of Dostoevski’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything, we would reply, “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.”
9. There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.
10. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.
11. It is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.
12. What did the prisoner dream about most frequently? Of bread, cake, cigarettes, and nice warm baths.
13. 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.
14. No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
15. I generally answered all kinds of questions truthfully. But I was silent about anything that was not expressly asked for. If I were asked my age, I gave it. If asked about my profession, I said “doctor,” but did not elaborate.
16. “Listen, Otto, if I don’t get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.”
17. At times, lightning decisions had to be made, decisions which spelled life or death. The prisoner would have preferred to let fate make the choice for him.
18. We found out just how uncertain human decisions are, especially in matters of life and death.
19. The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?
20. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed.
21. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
22. 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.
23. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.
24. Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
25. An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.
26. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.
27. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence.
28. “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge.
29. Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
30. Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man — his courage and hope, or lack of them — and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.
31. 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.
32. It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action.
37. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross.
38. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
39. There was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
40. 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.
41. 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.
42. The immediate influence of behavior is always more effective than that of words. But at times a word was effective too, when mental receptiveness had been intensified by some outer circumstances.
43. I quoted from Nietzsche: “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.” (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.)
44. I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour.
45. What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.
46. All we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
47. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.
48. From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two — the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society.
49. Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil?
50. No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
51. Apart from the moral deformity resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure, there were two other fundamental experiences which threatened to damage the character of the liberated prisoner: bitterness and disillusionment when he returned to his former life.
52. During psychoanalysis, the patient must lie down on a couch and tell you things which sometimes are very disagreeable to tell.
53. Now, in logotherapy the patient may remain sitting erect but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear.
54. Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future.
55. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.
56. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.
57. Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!
58. Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy.
59. 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.
60. 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.
61. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state.
62. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
63. 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.
64. Man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
65. Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible.
66. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.
67. The meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be.
68. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
69. Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.
70. In logotherapy, love is not interpreted as a mere epiphenomenon of sexual drives and instincts in the sense of a so-called sublimation. Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex.
71. 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.
72. It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
73. But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering — provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable.
74. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
75. The burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.
76. Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest or rabbi in former days.
77. Procreation is not the only meaning of life, for then life in itself would become meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful merely by its perpetuation.
78. 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.
79. The more a man tries to demonstrate his sexual potency or a woman her ability to experience orgasm, the less they are able to succeed.
80. Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.
81. I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.
82. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
83. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
84. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
85. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
86. Optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope. Faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either.
87. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy,
88. Once an individual’s search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.
89. People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. To be sure, some do not even have the means.
90. As soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity — their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone
91. A strong meaning orientation plays a decisive role in the prevention of suicide.
92. Study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about as against those who have not.
93. I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.
94. As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons.
95. Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
96. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.
97. One may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past — the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized — and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.
98. Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless.
99. But everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find.
100. The world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
Written by Mary Mpembee
I write bookish content mpembeemary@gmail.com
We deceive ourselves about love — about who; and how; and when; and whether. We also discover and correct our self-deceptions. The forces making for both deception and unmasking here are various and powerful: the unsurpassed danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection. Any of these can serve either truth or falsity, as the occasion demands. The difficulty then becomes: how in the midst of this confusion (and delight and pain) do we know what view of ourselves, what parts of ourselves, to trust? Which stories about the condition of the heart are the reliable ones and which the self-deceiving fictions? We find ourselves asking where, in this plurality of discordant voices with which we address ourselves on this topic of perennial self-interest, is the criterion of truth? (And what does it mean to look for a criterion here? Could that demand itself be a tool of self-deception?)
