Tag: Viktor Frankl

1. Men died less from a lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for
2. Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation
3. 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
4. A man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how
5. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior
6. ...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
7. Some men lost all hope, but it was the incorrigible optimists who were the most irritating companions
8. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain, but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom
9. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. 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
10. Suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore, the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative
11. No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same
12. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one's master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course
13. 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. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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.
14. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our "provincial existence" as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. 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. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless
15. It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future
16. Each task that each man must complete, and therefore 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.
17. But for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all. As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare. The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear any more - except his God.
18. Man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health...Thus it can be seen that 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.
19. Can discover the meaning in life in three different ways - creating a work or doing a deed, experiencing something or encountering someone and by the attitude we take toward avoiding suffering
20. Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice
21. Man has both potentialities [sinner and saint] within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions
22. 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 at Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Sherma Yisrael on his lips.
23. I do not forget any good deed done to me and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one

  What I got out of it  

1. Be so incredibly grateful about your circumstances, whatever they may be, for even Frankl, who lost everything but his meaning to live, still found a way to learn and benefit from his gut-wrenching experiences.