por I leave you the best quotes of Victor Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist founder of logotherapy, who lived in various concentration camps during World War II. His best known and most influential work is Man’s Search for Meaning.
The fundamental principle of Viktor Frankl’s theory is that people’s main motivation is to have meaning in life and that psychotherapy has to help patients find that purpose. Frankl based this theory on his experiences in the concentration camps; He observed that people who had a reason had more strength to get ahead.
After working in a psychiatric hospital in Vienna, opening a private practice, and working at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, Frankl and his family were captured by the Nazis and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where his father died. He was later transferred to Auschwitz, where his mother died. His wife would also die in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
As can be read in his work Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl lived through really difficult and hard times in the concentration camps, and observed that prisoners who had a reason to live had a better chance of surviving. Luckily Frankl survived, returned to Vienna and continued to work as a neurologist, dying in 1997.
Viktor Frankl’s best quotes
-They can take away everything, except the freedom to act as you want.
-No one can be aware of the essence of another human being unless they love him.
Suffering ceases to be at the moment it acquires meaning.
-Love is the most important goal to which a man can aspire.
-I have found the meaning of my life by helping others to find meaning in their lives.
-Man has two potentials: to be good or to be bad. What he is depends on his decisions, not on his conditions.
-There is no need to be ashamed of tears, because they are witnesses that man has had the courage to suffer.
-Listen to what your conscience tells you to do, and go and do what your knowledge allows you.
-Success is obtained as an unintended side effect of personal dedication to a cause that is bigger than oneself.
-We cannot judge a biography by its length or by the number of pages it has. We must judge it by the wealth of content.
-The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things through the light of humor is a trick that is learned when the art of living is mastered.
-The pessimist is like a man who observes with fear and sadness that the calendar on the wall becomes thinner with the passing of the days.
-The salvation of man is through and by love.
-Humor is another of the weapons with which the soul fights for its survival.
-It is the spiritual freedom that cannot be taken away from us, which makes life have meaning and purpose.
-Know the «why» of your existence and you will be able to support almost any «how».
-Human kindness is found in all groups, even in those who deserve to be condemned.
-No man should judge unless he honestly asks himself if in a similar situation, he would not have done the same.
-A blow that even misses the mark can, under certain circumstances, hurt us more than one that hits the target.
-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.
-Life demands a contribution from everyone and it is up to the individual to discover what it consists of.
-Misfortunes often open the windows to see the sky.
-Man self-realizes to the same extent that he commits himself to fulfilling the meaning of his life.
-Live as if you were already living for the second time and as if you had acted as unwisely the first time as you are about to act now.
-Man does not simply exist, but decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
-Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of mental independence, even in terrible circumstances of psychic and physical stress.
-Success, as well as happiness, cannot be pursued, but has to come.
-Happiness must pass, and the same happens with success. You should let them happen without worrying about it.
-Life is not made unbearable by circumstances, it is only made unbearable by the lack of meaning and purpose.
-If there is meaning in life, then there must be meaning in suffering.
-We, who live in concentration camps, can remember the men who walked from hut to hut comforting others, giving away their piece of bread.
-For someone who has lived well, does it matter if he realizes that he is getting old? No thanks, will say who has lived well.
-Suffering is one of the things I am most proud of, even though it is something that does not generate the envy of others.
-I do not forget the good things that have been done to me and I do not bear the resentment of the bad things that have been done to me.
-The consciousness of being is not a goal to which one can aim, for the simple fact that the more you aim at it, the less you will touch it.
-Sometimes, the “unfinished” ones are the most beautiful of the symphonies.
Suffering is an aspect of life that cannot be eradicated, just as fate or death cannot be removed. Without all of them life is not complete.
-It does not matter that we do not expect anything from life, but if life expects something from us.
-The man who has not gone through adverse circumstances does not know himself well.
-Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.
-Death can only cause fear to those who do not know how to fill the time that is given to them to live.
-Man is the son of his past but not his slave, and he is the father of his future.
-The best way to achieve personal fulfillment is to dedicate yourself to disinterested goals.
What we really need is a radical change in our attitude towards life.
-The most painful aspect of the blows is the insult that they include.
-Luck is what one does not have to suffer.
-The abnormal reaction before abnormal situations is part of normal behavior.
-Happiness cannot be pursued, it must come.
-Man, dispossessed of everything in this world, can still know happiness if he contemplates the loved one.
-Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase her, the more she runs away. But if you turn your attention to other things, she comes and gently lands on your shoulder.
-The experiences of life in a concentration camp show that man has the ability to choose.
-Love is the only way to apprehend another human being in the depths of his personality.
-The true meaning of life must be found in the world and not within the human being or his own psyche, as if it were a closed system.
-A life whose last and only meaning consisted of overcoming or succumbing would not be worth living at all.
-Those responsible for the prisoner’s most intimate state of mind were not so much psychological causes as the result of his free decision.
-The man who becomes aware of his responsibility before the human being who awaits him with all his affection or before an unfinished work will never be able to throw his life overboard.
-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.
-The final experience for the man who returns home is the wonderful feeling that there is nothing he has to fear anymore, except his God.
-The search by man for the meaning of life constitutes a primary force and not a «secondary rationalization» of his instinctive impulses.
-Every man is asked about life and can only respond to life by answering for his own life; only by being responsible can he answer to life.
‘There are times when outrage can arise even in an apparently hardened prisoner, outrage caused not by cruelty or pain, but by the insult with which it is attached.
Those who have not been through a similar experience can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental conflict and willpower conflicts experienced by a starving man.
-Despite the physical and mental primitivism prevailing by force, in the life of the concentration camp it was still possible to develop a profound spiritual life.
-As the inner life of the prisoners became more intense, we also felt the beauty of art and nature as never before.
-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.
-The awareness of self-love is so deeply rooted in the highest and most spiritual things, that it cannot be uprooted even by living in a concentration camp.
-There is nothing in the world that enables a person so much to overcome external difficulties and internal limitations, as the awareness of having a task in life.
-When you love, you see the potential in the loved one, which may not exist yet, but it can exist.
-People who keep their “calendar” can reflect with pride and joy on the life they have lived to the fullest.
-I have realities in my past, not only realities of work done and love loved, but also realities of suffering suffered bravely.
-Human beings always aim and are directed by something or someone, besides themselves.
-In the concentration camps, we saw and witnessed comrades who behaved like pigs, while others behaved like saints.
-Everyone has a specific vocation or mission in life. Each one must carry out a concrete assignment that asks to be completed.
Suffering occupies the entire soul and the entire conscience of man, whether it is a lot or a little.
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