Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor E. Frankl

words of Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

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.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

have known successful businessmen who, upon retirement, lost all zest for life. Their work had given their lives meaning.

have known people who rose to the challenge of enduring the most terrible afflictions and situations as long as they believed there was a point to their suffering.

When my life was once endangered by a climbing accident, I felt only one sensation at the critical moment: curiosity, curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive or with a fractured skull or some other injuries.

man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber.

suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.

Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.

To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that “points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself … by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love.”

“there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy—healing through reading.”