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.
As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.
Even if you don't expect anything from life, doesn't life expect something from you?
It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.
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.
In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our.
Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time—inner time—which is a result of their unemployed state.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.
The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs. That was it, exactly, Frankl said. Those are the very words I had written. WILLIAM J. WINSLADE.
He also believed strongly in reconciliation rather than revenge; he once remarked, I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.
Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.
One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.
No-one will be able to make us believe that man is a sublimated animal once we can show that within him there is a repressed angel.
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex. Normally, sex is a mode of expression for love. Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love. Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.
As soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and instead tries to ridicule them by dealing with them in an ironic way - by applying paradoxical intention - the vicious circle is cut, the symptom diminishes and finally atrophies.
Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which a man can aspire. The salvation of man is through love and in love...
Gordon W. Allport's book, The Individual and His Religion: The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.
One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
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 dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.
In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.
Logotherapy bases its technique called paradoxical intention on the twofold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes.
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same. Long.
As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. 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.
Most important, he realized that, no matter what happened, he retained the freedom to choose how to respond to his suffering.
But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.
From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man.
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.
I think it was Lessing who once said, There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.
One can choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.
One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.
Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths.
As we said before, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.
When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
