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This is the core of the human spirit ... If we can find something to live for - if we can find some meaning to put at the center of our lives - even the worst kind of suffering becomes bearable.

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
Humans
Becomes
Even
Worst
Kind
Suffering
Something
Lives
Spirit
Bearable
Find
Center
Live
Core
Human
Meaning

More quotes by Viktor E. Frankl

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Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
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Everywhere man is confronted with fate , with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
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To suffer unecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
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Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
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No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.
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Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
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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. No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away. all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.
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Ultimate freedom is a man's right to choose his attitude.
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Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
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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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If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Sports allow men to build up situations of emergency. What he then demands of himself is unnecessary achievement - and unnecessary sacrifice. He artificially creates the tension that he has been spared by affluent society.
Viktor E. Frankl
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But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the web of life.
Viktor E. Frankl
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What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, 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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Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality
Viktor E. Frankl
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Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
Viktor E. Frankl
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What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
Viktor E. Frankl
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When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor E. Frankl