70 Viktor and phrases. Frankl about the meaning of life

70 Viktor and phrases. Frankl about the meaning of life

Viktor Emil Frankl (1905 - 1997) was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and a holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of the logotherapy, which is an existential form of analysis, the "Third School of Psychotherapy of Vienna". Your best-seller Man's Search for Meaning He tells his experiences as inmate in a concentration camp, which led him to discover the importance of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most brutal, and thus, a reason to continue living. Frankl became one of the key figures of existential therapy and an important source of inspiration for humanistic psychologists.

Today we have compiled some of your best appointments to inspire you, do not miss them!

Celebres from Viktor e. Frankl

Life never becomes unbearable by circumstances, but only for lack of meaning and purpose.

Decisions, not conditions, determine who we are.

Success, such as happiness, is the unexpected side effect of personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.

The meaning of my life is to help others find meaning in yours.

Being tolerant does not mean that you share the belief of another person. But it means that I recognize another's right to believe and obey their own conscience.

It is not the past that stops us, is the future; And how we weaken it, today.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as if you had acted badly the first time.

Forces that escape your control can take everything you own except one, your freedom to choose how you are going to respond to the situation.


Our greatest human freedom is that, despite our physical situation in life, we are always free to choose our thoughts!

Humor is another of the weapons of the soul in the struggle for self -preservation.

No man should judge unless he wonder with absolute honesty if in a similar situation he could not have done the same.

There are two races of men in this world, but only these two: the breed of decent man and the race of indecent man.

I do not forget any good action that they have done to me, and I do not hold a grudge for a bad.

When a person cannot find a deep sense of their meaning, it is distracted with pleasure.

The search for meaning is the key to mental health and human flowering.

A man who becomes aware of responsibility, who tends to another human being and awaits him affectionately, or towards an unfinished job, can never get rid of his life. He knows the "why" of his existence, and will be able to endure almost any "how".

Somehow, suffering ceases to be suffering at the time it finds meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Do not create your mission in life, you detect it.

Between the stimulus and the answer there is a space. In that space we have the power to choose our response. In our response is our growth and our freedom.


Life is not mainly a search for pleasure, as Freud believed, nor a search for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a search for meaning. The best task for anyone is to find meaning to their own life.

I would say that our patients are never really desperate for suffering in itself! On the other hand, its despair arises in each instance of a doubt as to whether suffering is significant. The man is ready and willing to endure any suffering as soon as he can see a meaning in him.

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

Life asks each individual for a contribution, and corresponds to that individual to discover what should be.

The important thing is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.

This is the core of the human spirit ... If we can find something to live for, if we can find any meaning to put in the center of our lives, even the worst type of suffering becomes bearable.

We can discover this meaning in the life in three different ways: 1. making a writing; 2. experiencing a value; and 3. suffering.

Even when it is not completely achieved, we improve striving to achieve a higher objective.

Love goes far beyond the natural person of being loved.

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, because tears testified that a man had the greatest courage, the value to suffer.


If there is any meaning in life, then there must be meaning in suffering.

This is where we find the central theme of existentialism: living is suffering, surviving is to find meaning in suffering.

The attempt to develop the sense of humor and see things with humor is a kind of learned trick while the art of living is dominated.

Sunday neurosis, that type of depression that afflicts the people who realize the lack of content in their lives when the hurries of the occupied week and the emptiness within them end up.

The pain is only bearable if we know that it will end, not if we den.

Each man is questioned by life; And he can only respond to life by responding for his own life; To life, you can only answer being responsible.

The inner strength of man can raise him above his outer destination.

The more the same forgets, the more human becomes the person.

Or belief in God is unconditional or is not belief at all.

In times of crisis, people seek meaning. The meaning is strength. Our survival can depend on our search and search.

The only thing you can't take away is the way I choose to answer what you do to me. The last of freedom is to choose one in any circumstance.


Suffering unnecessary is more than heroic masochistic.

Everything can be taken from a man, except one thing: the last of human freedoms: choose one attitude in any set of circumstances, choose their own path.

If we take a man as he is, we get worse, but if we take man as he should be, we do it capable of becoming what it can be.

God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies

Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm, while a great fire is reinforced by it, in the same way, a weak faith is weakened by the situation and catastrophes, while strong faith is strengthened by them.

When a man discovers that it is his destiny to suffer ... his only opportunity lies in the way he supports his burden.

For success, such as happiness, you cannot pursue; It must occur, and it only does it as the involuntary collateral effect of the personal dedication of one to a larger cause or as the byproduct of the delivery of one to a person that is not oneself.

At that time, it is not the physical pain that hurts the most (and this applies to both adults and punished children); It is the mental agony caused by injustice, the irrationality of everything.

Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the network of life.

The existential vacuum is mainly manifested in a state of boredom.

When we can no longer change a situation, we have the challenge of changing ourselves.

Logotherapy considers man as a being whose main concern is to meet a meaning and update their values, rather than mere gratification and satisfaction of impulses and instincts.

Love is the only way to capture another human being in the deepest nucleus of your personality.

Despair is suffering without meaning.

Regardless of what happens to you, you can always choose to thank by imagining how it could have been worse.

The more you forgive yourself, when you give yourself to a cause to serve or another person to love, the more you are and the more you update yourself.

Once the search for meaning of an individual is successful, not only makes you happy, but also gives you the ability to deal with suffering.

Our generation is realistic, because we have come to know the man as it really is. After all, man is that being that invented Auschwitz's gas cameras; However, it is also that being that entered those gas chambers in vertical position, with the Our Father or the Israel Shema on his lips.

Every human being has the freedom to change at any moment.

What we really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude towards life. We had to learn to ours.

The main concern of man is not to obtain pleasure or avoid pain, but rather to see a meaning in his life.

Your last freedom is to choose your attitude.

You should not seek an abstract meaning of life ... life can become significant in three ways: first, through what we give to life ... secondly, for what we take from the world ... third, taking a destiny that already We cannot change.

It is likely that nothing helps a person to overcome or support problems that awareness of having a task in life.

Self -realization cannot be achieved if it becomes an end in itself, but only as a side effect of self -transcendence.

As a teacher in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the degree to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a teacher in two fields, I am a survivor of four fields, that is, concentration camps, and as such I am also a witness of the unexpected measure in which man is able to challenge and challenge even the worst imaginable conditions.

More and more people have the means to live, but it does not make sense to live.

There is nothing in the world, I dare to say that it is so effective in helping one to survive even in the worst conditions, such as the knowledge that there is meaning in life.

What man really needs is not a state without tension but rather the effort and struggle for some objective worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of voltage at any price, but the call of a potential meaning that hopes to be fulfilled by him.

Love is the only way to capture another human being in the most intimate nucleus of his personality. No one can become aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. Thanks to your love, you can see the essential features and characteristics.

I am absolutely convinced that Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidanek gas cameras were not finally prepared in any ministry or another in Berlin, but in the desks and conference rooms of scientists and philosophers nihilists.

I finally understood 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 love.

Our attitude towards what has happened to us in life is the important thing that we must recognize. Once without hope, my life is now full of hope, but it did not happen overnight. The last of human freedoms, choosing one in any set of circumstances, is to choose the path itself.

Los Angeles are lost in the perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.

Seeing life as a series of movie paintings, the end and meaning may not be apparent until the end of the film and, nevertheless, each of the hundreds of individual frames has meaning within the context of the entire film.

Everyone has their own specific vocation or mission in life; All must carry out a specific task that requires compliance. There you cannot be replaced, nor can your life be repeated, therefore, the task of each one is unique, as its specific opportunity to implement it.

The way a man accepts his destiny and all the suffering he entails, the way he takes his cross, gives him a wide opportunity, even in the most difficult circumstances, to add a deeper meaning to his life. It can remain brave, worthy and selfless. Or in the bitter struggle for self -preservation, you can forget your human dignity and become nothing more than an animal.

Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.

Man can only find meaning for his existence in something out of him.

Love goes far beyond the natural person of the beloved. Find its deepest meaning in your spiritual being, your inner self. If you are really present or not, if you are still alive or not, somehow it ceases to be important.

A human being is a decisive being.