Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor E. Frankl

Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.

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.

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.

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.

I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying.

“Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as s...

“How beautiful the world could be!”

In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom.

he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well;

Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.

It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situ...

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.

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. Thus 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.

And yet we were all very pleased! There was no chimney in this camp and Auschwitz was a long way off.

We were grateful for the smallest of mercies.

We were glad when there was time to delouse before going to bed, although in itself this was no pleasure, as it meant standing naked in an unheated hut where icicles hung from the ceiling.

The meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness—“freedom from suffering” as Schopenhauer put it—and even that in a relative way only.

Real positive pleasures, even small ones, were very few.

No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

we, the sheep, thought of two things only—how to evade the bad dogs and how to get a little food.

one of the camp’s most imperative laws of self-preservation: Do not be conspicuous.

We tried at all times to avoid attracting the attention of the SS.

the desperately ill received no medicine.

It would not have helped, and besides, it would have deprived those for whom there was still some hope.

It is very difficult for an outsider to grasp how very little value was placed on human life in camp.

The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever.

Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded.

Since the prisoner continually witnessed scenes of beatings, the impulse toward violence was increased.

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.

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.

in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.

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 con...

These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.

the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.

It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life mea...

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.

Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.

We have stated that that which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoner’s inner self was not so much the enumerated psychophysical causes as it was the result of a free decision.

Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp’s degenerating influences.

Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences, agree that the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be.

It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end.

A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life.

In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience!

This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remote—out of reach and, in a way, unreal.

Regarding our “provisional existence” as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless.