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Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.

Viktor E. Frankl

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Viktor E. Frankl
Age: 92 †
Born: 1905
Born: March 26
Died: 1997
Died: September 2
Existential Therapist
Neurologist
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Surgeon
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor Emil Frankl
Sense
Life
Woe
Carrying
Aim
Saws
Therefore
Purpose
Point

More quotes by Viktor E. Frankl

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Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.
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Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.
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At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children) it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.
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Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.
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A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the why for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any how.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.
Viktor E. Frankl
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The transitoriness of our existence in now way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities.
Viktor E. Frankl
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A human being is not one thing among others things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes-within the limits of endowment and environment-he has made out of himself.
Viktor E. Frankl
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A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
Viktor E. Frankl
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The meaning of my life is to help others find meaning in theirs.
Viktor E. Frankl
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[Speaking of his experience in a concentration camp:] 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...Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.
Viktor E. Frankl
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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 E. Frankl
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Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Viktor E. Frankl
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One should not search for an abstract meaning of life ... Life can be made meaningful in a threefold way: first, through what we give to life ... second, by what we take from the world ... third, through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change.
Viktor E. Frankl
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We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it we must judge by the richness of the contents...Sometimes the 'unfinisheds' are among the most beautiful symphonies.
Viktor E. Frankl
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The last of human freedoms - the ability to chose one's attitude especially an attitude of gratitude in a given set of circumstances especially in difficult circumstances.
Viktor E. Frankl
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The more one forgets one’s own self, the more human the person becomes.
Viktor E. Frankl
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We had to learn...that it did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
Viktor E. Frankl