Quotesdtb.com
Home
Authors
Quotes of the day
Top quotes
Topics
Viktor Frankl quotes - page 4
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.
Viktor Frankl
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.
Viktor Frankl
No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
Viktor Frankl
Being tolerant does not mean that I share another ones belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another ones right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.
Viktor Frankl
Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it-likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.
Viktor Frankl
As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps - concentration camps, that is - and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.
Viktor Frankl
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
Viktor Frankl
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
Viktor Frankl
The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.
Viktor Frankl
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. 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.
Viktor Frankl
Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
Viktor Frankl
Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.
Viktor Frankl
Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
Viktor Frankl
Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
Viktor Frankl
Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.
Viktor Frankl
I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way an honorable way in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
Viktor Frankl
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. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. 'Et lux in tenebris lucet'and the light shineth in the darkness.
Viktor Frankl
There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.
Viktor Frankl
Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a manhis courage and hope, or lack of themand the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friends death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed.
Viktor Frankl
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. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.
Viktor Frankl
But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
Viktor Frankl
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... 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.
Viktor Frankl
Previous
1
2
3
4
(Current)
5
Next