The Feeling of Meaninglessness Quotes

“There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in his life.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“In former days, people frustrated in their will to meaning would probably have turned to a pastor, priest, or rabbi. Today, they crowd clinics and offices. The psychiatrist, then, frequently finds himself in an embarrassing situation, for he now is confronted with human problems rather than with specific clinical symptoms. Man’s search for a meaning is not pathological, but rather the surest sign of being truly human. Even if this search is frustrated, it cannot be considered a sign of disease. It is spiritual distress, not mental disease.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Some people say that a man dying in a sudden accident sees his whole life flash by, like a fantastically fast movie. To stay with this concept, one might say that in death, man has become the movie himself.
He now ‘is’ his life as he lived it, he is his own life history as it happened to him, as good as he has created it. Thus, he is his own heaven and his own hell.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Ultimately, man is not subject to the conditions that confront him; rather, these conditions are subject to his decision.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Man is by no means fully free. Man is not free from determinants. Man’s freedom is a finite freedom, not freedom from conditions; his freedom lies in the potentiality for taking a stand toward whatever conditions might confront him.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Being human means always being directed toward something other than oneself. [...] Human existence is not characterized by self-actualization but rather by what I call self-transcendence—pointing beyond itself.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Tension is not something to be avoided indiscriminately. Man does not need homeostasis at any cost, but rather a sound amount of tension such as that which is aroused by the demanding quality inherent in the meaning for human existence.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[P]leasure is not the goal of human strivings but rather a by-product of the fulfillment of such strivings; and power is not an end but a means to an end.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Man’s intrinsically human capacity to take a stand to whatever may confront him includes his capacity to choose his attitude toward himself, more specifically, to take a stand towards his own somatic and psychic conditions and determinants.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“I bear witness of the inestimable extent to which man, although he is never free from conditions and determinants, is always free to take a stand to whatever he might have to face. Although he may be conditioned and determined, he is never fully determined, he is not pandetermined.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“A human being, it is true, is a finite being. However, to the extent to which he understands his finiteness, he also overcomes it.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness. Happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue. Happiness is available only as a by-product, as the side-effect of living out the self-transcendence of existence.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Just as the boomerang returns to the hunter who has thrown it, only if it has missed its target, man returns to himself, reflects upon himself and becomes over-concerned with self-interpretation only when he has missed his mission, and has been frustrated in his search for meaning.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“How is the existential vacuum to be explained? Unlike the animal, man is no longer told by his instincts as to what he must do. And in contrast to former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what it is that he basically wishes to do. Instead, he gets to wish to do what other people do (conformity) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[M]an is by no means a product of inheritance and environment. Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end education is just education towards the ability to decide.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Our industrialized society is out to satisfy all needs, and our consumer society is even out to create needs in order to satisfy them; but the most human of all human needs—the need to see a meaning in one‘s life—remains unsatisfied. People may have enough to live by; but more often than not they do not have anything to live for.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Modern man needs to be considered as more than a psycho-physical reality. His spiritual existence cannot be neglected. He is not a mere organism. He is a person.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Psychotherapy cannot rest content with making man capable of enjoying pleasure or of doing a day’s work; it must also make him capable of bearing suffering, in a very definite sense.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Psychotherapy is like an equation with two unknowns—Psi equals x plus y. The one unknown is that ever variable and incalculable factor, the personality of the Doctor, and the other unknown is the individuality of the patient.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“True human wholeness must include the spiritual as an essential element. Moreover, the spiritual is precisely that constituent which is primarily responsible for the unity of man.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[W]hat matters is not the meaning of man’s life in general. To look for the general meaning of man’s life would be comparable to the question put to a chess player: “What is the best move?” There is no move at all, irrespective of the concrete situation of a special game. The same holds for human existence inasmuch as one can search only for the concrete meaning of personal existence, a meaning which changes from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[M]eaning cannot be grasped by merely intellectual means, for it supersedes essentially—or to speak more specifically—dimensionally, man’s capacity as a finite being. [...] This meaning necessarily transcends man and his world and, therefore, cannot be approached by merely rational processes. [...] [W]hat we have to deal with is no intellectual or rational process, but a wholly existential act which perhaps could be described by [...] ‘the basic trust in Being’.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[O]ur patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[M]an never, or at least not normally and primarily, sees in the partners whom he encounters and in the causes to which he commits himself merely a means to an end; for then he actually would have destroyed any authentic relationship to them. Then, they would have become mere tools, being of use for him, but, by the same token, would have ceased to have any value, that is to say, value in itself.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“One may discern and distinguish three chief groups of values [,] creative, experiential, and attitudinal values. This sequence reflects the three principal ways in which man can find meaning in life: first, by what he gives to the world in terms of his creation; second, by what he takes from the world in terms of encounters and experiences; and third, by the stand he takes when faced with a fate which he cannot change. This is why life never ceases to hold meaning, since even a person who is deprived of both creative and experiential values is still challenged by an opportunity for fulfillment, that is, by the meaning inherent in an upright way of suffering.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[O]ne may define values as those meaning-universals which crystallize in the typical situations a society—humanity—has to face.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“I, for one, would prefer to speak of uniqueness rather than relativity. [...] [M]an is unique in terms of both existence and essence. He is unique in that, in the final analysis, he cannot be replaced. And his life is unique in that no one can repeat it.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Meaning is relative inasmuch as it is related to a specific person who is entangled in a specific situation. One could say that meaning differs in two respects: first, from man to man, and second, from day to day—indeed, from hour to hour.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Human responsibility rests on the ‘activism of the future,’ the choosing of possibilities from the future, and the ‘optimism of the past,’ the making these possibilities a reality and thereby rescuing them into the haven of the past.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy