Viktor Frankl
Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy — the 'third Viennese school' of psychotherapy after Freud and Adler — whose 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning, written in nine days after his liberation from Nazi concentration camps, has sold more than sixteen million copies and is regularly named among the most influential books of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1905, Frankl survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Türkheim; his wife Tilly, mother, and brother were killed. From the camps he distilled a single conviction: that human beings can find meaning even in unavoidable suffering, and that the last of human freedoms is the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. He went on to write more than thirty books, hold professorships at Harvard and Stanford, and lecture at over two hundred universities. Frankl died in Vienna in 1997.
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Quotes by Viktor Frankl
110 quotes“You cannot become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by pursuing meaning.”
“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.”
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how.'”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
“Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
“In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.”
“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
“Happiness ensues as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”
“Man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”
“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, and from hour to hour.”
“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.”
“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
“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.”
“Man's search for meaning is the primary human motivation.”
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