Zitat des Tages von Viktor E. Frankl:
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
A human being is a deciding being.
Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'
When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.
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.
Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.
Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist's role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
Faith is trust in ultimate meaning.
Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
If you call 'religious' a man who believes in what I call a Supermeaning, a meaning so comprehensive that you can no longer grasp it, get hold of it in rational intellectual terminology, then one should feel free to call me religious, really.
Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.
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.'