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the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying.
“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”
life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.
“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.
want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
“Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.”
“There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.”
there are moments when indignation can rouse even a seemingly hardened prisoner—indignation not about cruelty or pain, but about the insult connected with it.
Those who have not gone through a similar experience can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental conflict and clashes of will power which a famished man experiences.
The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
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.
“Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”
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 situation, even if only for a few
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
