Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor E. Frankl

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.

Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.

Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.

freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.

consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief?

“All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about as against those who have not.”

Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

“Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt” (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find)

For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.