1. He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How. Nietzsche.
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. You cannot
control what happens to you in life, but you can control what you will feel and
do about what happens to you.
4. Life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable
ones.
5. Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more
you are going to miss it.
6. A man can get used to anything.
7. Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
8. The salvation of man is though love and in love.
9. Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
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 absolutely honesty whether in
a similar situation he might not have done the same.
12. In Auschwitz I had laid down a rule for myself which proved to be a good
one: I was silent about anything that was not expressly asked for.
13. Man does have a choice of action.
14. 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.
15. Even though conditions such us 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.
16. There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
17. The last inner freedom cannot be lost. It is the spiritual freedom, which
cannot be taken away, that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
18. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in
suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.
Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.
19. I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard.
20. It is such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the
opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.
21. Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still
to come and yet it is over already. Bismarck.
22. Emotion which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a
clear and precise picture of it. Spinoza.
23. 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 lost of hope and courage can have a
deadly effect.
24. It doesn't really matter what we expect from life, but what life expects
from us.
25. 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.
26. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other
destiny. No situations repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different
response. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is
always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
27. When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept
his suffering and his task, his single and unique task. He will have to
acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the
universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His
unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
28. 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.
29. That which doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.
Nietzsche.
30. What you have experienced, no power on earth can take away from you. Not
only our experiences, but 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 thing.
31. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it
would be easy to condemn.
32. 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.
33. No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
34. Man is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values.
35. 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. What man actually needs is
not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile
goal, a freely chosen task.
36. Existential vacuum: he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism)
or he does what other people whish him to do (totalitarianism)
37. The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour
to hour.
38. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a
concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced nor
can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is is specific
opportunity to implement it.
39. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather he
must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by
life and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life. To life he
can only respond by being responsible. Logotherapy seen in responsibleness the
very essence of human existence.
40. Life 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.
41. Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness.
42. 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.
43. What matters is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn
one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change
a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
44. Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.
45. The only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities. In the
past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.
46. Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality
of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These
sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things
which cannot inspire envy.
47. Paradoxical intention: it is the way to replace any fear by a paradoxical
wish.
48. Nothingbutness: the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological,
psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and
environment. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a
stand toward the conditions.
49. Pan-determinism: the view of man which disregards his capacity to take a
stand toward any conditions whatsoever.
50. Man doesn't simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what
he will become in the next moment.
51. The basis for any predictions would be represented by biological,
psychological or sociological conditions. Yet one of the main features of human
existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them.
Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing
himself for the better if necessary.
52. How can we dare to predict the behavior of a man?
53. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive
aspect is responsibleness. I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East
Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility of the West Coast.
54. Man has good and bad potentialities within himself. Which one is actualized
depends on decisions but not on conditions.
55. 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.
56. Tragic optimism: human capacity to creatively turn life's negative aspects
into something positive or constructive.
57. Happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue. One must have a reason to be
happy. Once the reason is found, however one becomes happy automatically. A
human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason
to become happy, last but not least through actualizing the potential meaning
inherent and dormant in a given situation.
58. To achieve personal meaning one must transcend subjective pleasures by
giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love.
59. Hope and positive energy can turn challenges into triumphs.
60. Why some people feel so empty? It is a question of the attitude. Positive
emotions, expectations and attitudes enhance our immune system.
61. I do not forget any good deed done to me and I do not carry a grudge for a
bad one.
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