Viktor Frankl

"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true."

- Viktor Frankl

"For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and 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."

- Viktor Frankl

"Life is never made unbearable by circumstance, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."

- Viktor Frankl

"No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same."

- Viktor Frankl

"Happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue."

- Viktor Frankl

"Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue."

- Viktor Frankl

"The attempt to develop a sense of humour and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living."

- Viktor Frankl

"Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."

- 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. For success, like 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 or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."

- 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. For success, like 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 or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it"

- 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. For success, like 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 or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."

- Viktor Frankl

"The only thing you have control over is your attitude."

- Viktor Frankl

""What is to give light must endure burning.""

- Viktor Frankl

"The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance."

- Viktor Frankl

"I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable."

- Viktor Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

- Viktor Frankl

"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."

- Viktor Frankl

"Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedom - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

- Viktor Frankl

"Everything can be taken from a man but…the last of the human freedoms– to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances."

- Viktor Frankl

"Everything can be taken from a man, but the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances."

- Viktor Frankl

"The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing."

- Viktor Frankl

"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him."

- Viktor Frankl

"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather 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."

- Viktor Frankl

"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. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. 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."

- Viktor Frankl

"What is to give light must endure burning."

- Viktor Frankl

"Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation."

- Viktor Frankl

"So 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

"The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? No, thank you,' he will think. '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, although these are things which cannot inspire envy."

- Viktor Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change a situation we are challenged to change ourselves."

- Viktor Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

- 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

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

- Viktor Frankl

"If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering."

- Viktor Frankl