Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

In truth, it has actually been preserved,

the imperfect nature of human beings is meaningful since—now regarded positively—it represents the individuality of our essential inner being.

Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake but individuality for the human community.

life itself means being questioned, means answering; each person must be responsible for their own existence. Life no longer appears to us as a given, but as something given over to us, it is a task in every moment. This therefore means that it can only become more meaningful the more difficult it becomes.

“Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”5

Somehow we know how much we were

able to grow and mature precisely during these joyless periods of our existence.

thirdly, human beings are able to find meaning even where finding value in life is not possible for them in either the first or the second way—namely, precisely when they take a stance toward the unalterable, fated, inevitable, and unavoidable limitation of their possibilities: how they adapt to this limitation, react toward it, how they accept this fate.

not the best nor the most beautiful in the world (if the patient had created them when he was professionally employed) would have been an accomplishment equal to the simple human achievement that this man demonstrated with his behavior in those last few hours of his life.

I’m doing mathematics every day and I don’t feel at all sentimental.

all our lives are ultimately unsuccessful, to the extent that we understand success as only being external success: no external success, no effect, that is to say, no biological or sociological influence out there in the world, is guaranteed to outlive us or even to last forever.

usefulness to society is not and can never be the only criterion that we are justified in applying to a person.

there is also a second way in which the person as a unique and individual being always comes into his own, in which the value of his personality is also realized and his personal, specific meaning of life is fulfilled: this is the way of love, or better still, of being loved.

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

The questions of “our lives” can, as we felt, only be answered by each of us being responsible for “our own lives.”

he tried to distance himself from this whole agonizing life, to get beyond it by looking at it, as they say, from a higher vantage point or from the viewpoint of the future, in the sense of a future theoretical observation.