Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor E. Frankl

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 great 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, as Frankl held on to the image of his wife through the darkest days in Auschwitz), and in courage in difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

What is life if there's no meaning

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.

Perhaps you will not even be able to control how you feel, but you will always control what you do. That power is yours and yours alone. Learn to accept that which you cannot control. But treat the responsibility of controlling your actions gracefully.

we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.

life is meaningful and that we must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances.

“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.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

the best of us did not return.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.”

I struck out my whole former life.

and then, quite unexpectedly, most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives.

a man can get used to anything,

Dostoevsky

“There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.”

mortification of normal reactions was hastened.

Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner’s psychological reactions,

At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.

The most painful part of beatings is the insult which they imply.

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.

suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.

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.

“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

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.

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.

When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.

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

no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.

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

mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.

we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed.

suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

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.

you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There’s no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act.”