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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 life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.”
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
“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.
Every man was controlled by one thought only: to keep himself alive for the family waiting for him at home, and to save his friends.
Thus, when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned.
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.
Cold curiosity predominated even in Auschwitz, somehow detaching the mind from its surroundings, which came to be regarded with a kind of objectivity.
And yet sleep came and brought oblivion and relief from pain for a few hours.
Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days—after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.
“There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.”
Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.
woe to the vanquished.
The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
The salvation of man is through love and in love.
“The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved.
“Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”
perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying.
The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
Who can throw a stone at a man who favors his friends under circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life or death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt.
Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.”
from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action.
Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.
Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually.
“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
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.
that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end.
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. Prisoners, too, suffered from this strange “time-experience.”
They experience a similar existence—without a future and without a goal.
A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts.
It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist.
Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.
They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”
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.
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.
No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
