Viktor Frankl Quotes

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. – Viktor Frankl

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. – Viktor Frankl

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose. – Viktor Frankl

What is to give light must endure burning. – Viktor Frankl

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. – Viktor Frankl

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself. – Viktor Frankl

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! – Viktor Frankl

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. – Viktor Frankl

Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. – Viktor Frankl

The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. – Viktor Frankl

Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. – Viktor Frankl

Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. – Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl Quotes part 2

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. – Viktor Frankl

Time and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success— the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. – Viktor Frankl

But 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. – Viktor Frankl

The more one forgets himself— by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love— the more human he is. – Viktor Frankl

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. – Viktor Frankl

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. – Viktor Frankl

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose. – Viktor Frankl

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives. – Viktor Frankl

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human. – Viktor Frankl

The salvation of man is through love and in love. – Viktor Frankl

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. – Viktor Frankl

In the concentration camps, in the face of all the sufferings of the powerless, it was possible for the powerless to keep their human dignity intact. – Viktor Frankl

One does not become fully human, by virtue of suffering, but rather by actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in all suffering. – Viktor Frankl

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. – Viktor Frankl

By declaring he has to be fully responsible for himself, to the point of finally acknowledging that he is the only part of his whole life that has yet to be fulfilled— by totally assuming the tacit responsibility of existence, the existential vacuum ceases to exist. – Viktor Frankl

Freedom is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. – Viktor Frankl

The salvation of man is through love and in love. – Viktor Frankl

Man is tended by life itself. Life is a task to be fulfilled; it counts on the continuation of your being alive. – Viktor Frankl

To the same degree that you have a self-responsible attitude toward death, so also will you be, more or less, antisuicidal. – 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

Even suffering ceases to be suffering when it finds meaning in our life. – Viktor Frankl

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. – Viktor Frankl

One must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation. – Viktor Frankl

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. – Viktor Frankl

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. – Viktor Frankl

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. – Viktor Frankl

The will to meaning is not an abstract, theoretical motive; for people will experience their lives as meaningful to the extent that they participate actively in the unfolding of something that is truly worth doing. – Viktor Frankl

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. – Viktor Frankl

Change is for the better and against any change is against its inherent nature. – Viktor Frankl

What is called “self-actualization” is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. – Viktor Frankl

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

I understand that in former times man had always been looking for more and more certainty in life, believing himself to be invulnerable and immortal. However, since man became aware that he is mortal, he expelled himself from paradise, thus losing the certainty which he had hoped to keep. – Viktor Frankl

There are not a few who find no answer to the question of why they are alive; those who do not are likely to die prematurely. – Viktor Frankl