Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Normally, the credit column contains all the suffering and pain, the debit column lists all the happiness and good fortune which one did not attain.

Rabindranath Tagore expressed all this, the disappointment human beings feel towards their claim to happiness in life, in this poem in which he says: I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked – and behold, duty was joy.

Kierkegaard who told the wise parable that the door to happiness always opens ‘outwards’, which means it closes itself precisely against the person who tries to push the door to happiness ‘inwards’,

‘What can I expect from life?’ but can now only be: ‘What does life expect of me?’ What task in life is waiting for me? Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way,

We give life meaning through our actions, but also through loving and, finally, through suffering.

Therefore, if life has meaning, suffering also has meaning.

Suicide is in no way the answer to any question; suicide is never able to solve a problem.

Hebbel, who says: ‘Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!’fn6

Well, when it comes to the consumption of goods such as food, hospital beds, the work of doctors and nurses, the consideration of these resources is irrelevant to a discussion about this argument if we keep one thing in mind: a state that is already economically so badly off that it relies on eliminating the relatively insignificant percentage of its incurable citizens in order to save on those aforementioned goods – such a state has already reached the end economically.

them: indeed one cannot earn love, love is not a reward, but a blessing.

For it is the nature of love that makes us see our loved one in their uniqueness and individuality.

we do not have the right to deny any patient this will to live!