Here are the top 50 quotes of Viktor Frankl , Austrian psychiatrist, founder of the Logotherapy Who lived in several concentration camps. His best-known work is Man's Search for Meaning .
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1-Live as if you were already living a second time and as if the first time you had already acted as unfortunate as now you are about to act.
2-The experiences of the life in a field demonstrate that the man has the capacity of election.
3-Love is the only way to apprehend another human being in the depths of his personality.
4. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of mental independence, even in the terrible circumstances of psychic and physical tension.
5-Man can be snatched from everything except one thing: the last of human liberties - the choice of personal attitude before a set of circumstances - to decide his own way.
6-It is this spiritual freedom, which can not be taken away, which makes life have meaning and purpose.
7-In declaring that man is a responsible creature and must apprehend the potential meaning of his life, I want to emphasize that the true meaning of life must be found in the world and not within the human being or his own psyche, as if It would be a closed system.
8-An active life serves the intentionality of giving man an opportunity to understand his merits in creative work, while a passive life of simple enjoyment offers you the opportunity to obtain fullness by experiencing beauty, art or nature. But life is also positive, which is almost empty of both creation and joy and which admits a single possibility of conduct; Namely, the attitude of man towards his existence, an existence restricted by forces that are alien to him. This man is forbidden both the creative life and the existence of enjoyment, but not only are creativity and enjoyment significant; All aspects of life are equally significant, so suffering must be so too. Suffering is an aspect of life that can not be eradicated, as destiny or death can not be separated. Without them all life is not complete.
9-A life whose last and only meaning was to overcome it or to succumb, a life, therefore, whose meaning depended, in the last instance, of chance would not deserve at all the pain of being lived.
10-The way a man accepts his destiny and all the suffering it entails, the way he carries his cross, gives him many opportunities-even under the most difficult circumstances-to add a deeper meaning to his life. It can preserve its value, its dignity, its generosity. Or, in the harsh struggle for survival, he can forget his human dignity and be little more than an animal, as the psychology of the prisoner in a concentration camp reminds us. Here lies the opportunity that man has to take advantage of or miss opportunities to achieve the merits that a difficult situation can provide. And what decides if it deserves its sufferings or it is not.
11. Ultimately, those responsible for the inmates' most intimate state of mind were not so much the psychological causes already enumerated as the result of their free decision.
12-Many of the prisoners in the concentration camp believed that the opportunity to live had already happened to them, and yet the reality was that it represented an opportunity and a challenge: that either the experience can be turned into victories, life into An internal triumph, or else you can ignore the challenge and confine yourself to vegetarianism as most of the prisoners did.
13-Those who know the close relationship between a person's state of mind - his courage and his hopes, or the lack of both - and his body's ability to remain immune, also know that if he suddenly loses hope and The value, this can cause death.
14-What we really need is a radical change in our attitude towards life.
15 - We must to World War II have enriched our knowledge about"psychopathology of the masses", giving us the war of nerves and the unique and unforgettable experience of concentration camps. We have to learn for ourselves and then teach the desperate that it does not really matter that we expect nothing from life, but that life expects something from us. We have to stop asking ourselves questions about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as beings whom life has incessantly and incessantly inquired about. Our answer must be made not of words nor of meditation, but of a right conduct and action. Ultimately, living means taking responsibility for finding the right answer to the problems it poses and fulfilling the tasks that life assigns continuously to each individual.
16-The man who becomes aware of his responsibility to the human being who awaits him with all his affection or before an unfinished work can never throw his life overboard. He knows the"why"of his existence and can bear almost any"how".
17-From all the foregoing we must draw the consequence that there are two races of men in the world and nothing more than two: the"race"of decent men and the race of the indecent.
18-The final experience for the man who returns to his home is the wonderful feeling that, after all that he has suffered, there is nothing that he has to fear except his God.
19-Man's search for the meaning of life is a primary force and not a"secondary rationalization"of his instinctual impulses.
20-Ultimately, man should not inquire what the meaning of life is, but understand that it is he who is concerned. In a word, every man is asked about life and can only respond to life by responding for his own life; Only being responsible can answer life.
21-Human goodness is found in all groups, even those who, in general terms, deserve to be condemned.
22-And at that moment the whole truth became apparent to me and I did what was the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I erased all previous life from my consciousness.
23- Strange as it may seem, a blow that even fails to give, may, under certain circumstances, hurt us more than one that hits the mark.
24-The most painful aspect of the blows is the insult they include.
25-I want to show that there are moments when indignation can arise even in a prisoner apparently hardened, indignation not caused by cruelty or pain, but by the insult to which it is attached.
26-I immediately understood in a lived way, that no dream, however horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the countryside around us and to which I was about to give it back.
"I am but a small part of a great mass of human flesh... of a mass enclosed behind the barbed wire of thorns, crowded into a few earthen huts. A mass of which day by day decomposes a percentage because it no longer has life.
28-Those who have not gone through a similar experience can hardly conceive the soul-destroying mental conflict nor the conflicts of willpower experienced by a hungry man.
29-In spite of the physical and mental primitivism prevailing to the force, in the life of the concentration camp still it was possible to develop a deep spiritual life.
30-I did not know if my wife was alive, or had a way to find out (during the time of seclusion there was no postal contact with the outside), but by then I had stopped caring, I did not need to know, nothing could alter the force Of my love, my thoughts or the image of my beloved.
31-As the inmates' inner life became more intense, we also felt the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under his influence we would forget our terrible circumstances.
32-Humor is another weapon with which the soul fights for its survival. It is well known that, in human existence, humor can provide the distance necessary to overcome any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
33-An analogy could be drawn: man's suffering acts in a similar way as gas does in the vacuum of a chamber; It will be filled completely and equally whatever its capacity. Similarly, suffering occupies the whole soul and the whole consciousness of man whether suffering is much as if it is little. Hence the"size"of human suffering is absolutely relative, from which it follows that the smallest thing can give rise to the greatest joys.
34-Luck is what one does not have to suffer.
35. Just as the sheep flock timidly in the center of the flock, we also sought the center of the formations: there we had more opportunities to dodge the blows of the guards who marched on both sides, in front and in the rear of the herd. column.
36-All of us had once believed that we were"someone"or at least we had imagined it. But now they treated us as if we were nobody, as if we did not exist.
37. The consciousness of self-love is so deeply rooted in the higher and more spiritual things that it can not be started or lived in a concentration camp.
38-I have found the meaning of my life helping others find meaning in their lives.
39-There is nothing in the world that enables a person so much to overcome external difficulties and internal limitations as the consciousness of having a task in life.
40-Death can only cause dread to those who do not know how to fill the time they are given to live.
41. Man is the son of his past but not his slave, and he is the father of his future.
42-If it is not in your hands to change a situation that causes you pain, you can always choose the attitude with which you face that suffering.
43-Life requires every individual a contribution and it is up to the individual to discover what it is.
44-Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you pursue it, the more you flee. But if you turn your attention to other things, she comes and gently rests on your shoulder. Happiness is not an inn on the road, but a way of walking through life
45. The best way to achieve personal fulfillment is to dedicate yourself to unselfish goals.
46. The man who has not gone through adverse circumstances is not really well known.
47. I understood how man, dispossessed of everything in this world, can still know happiness - even if only momentarily - if he contemplates the loved one.
48-The human being is not one thing among other things; Things determine one another; But man, in the last analysis, is his own determinant. What you become-within the limits of your faculties and your surroundings-you have to do for yourself.
49-Ruins are often the ones that open the windows to see the sky.
50-Man is self-realization in the same measure as he is committed to the fulfillment of the meaning of his life.