Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor E. Frankl

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.

The latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. 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.

(What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.)

Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

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

Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it.