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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.

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
Life
Meaning
Alfred
Taught
Freud
Greatest
Quests
Pleasure
Quest
Power
Primarily
Persons
Task
Person
Believed
Find
Tasks
Adler

More quotes by Viktor E. Frankl

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I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.
Viktor E. Frankl
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But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Man's last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation
Viktor E. Frankl
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The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose ones attitude in any given circumstance.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Either belief in God is unconditional or it is no belief at all.
Viktor E. Frankl
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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.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.
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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I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
Viktor E. Frankl
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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.
Viktor E. Frankl
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The one thing you can't take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me.
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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Then I grasped 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 in love.
Viktor E. Frankl
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There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.
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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Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
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Despair is suffering without meaning.
Viktor E. Frankl