Yes to Life Quotes

“Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake but individuality for the human community.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“Even more powerful than fate is the courage that bears it steadfastly.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life,”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life—it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us—we are the ones who are questioned! We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential "life questions." Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to—of being responsible toward—life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us. Now everything depends on what is expected of us. As to what awaits us in the future, we don't need to know any more than we are able to know it.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“We give life meaning not only through our actions but also through loving and, finally, through suffering. Because how human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions—the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions—in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“A human being should never become a means to an end.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“indeed one cannot earn love; love is not a reward, but a blessing.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it—or leave unfulfilled—that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“Whether a life is fulfilled does not depend on how great one's radius of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is fully filled out.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“being human is nothing other than being conscious and being responsible!”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

“The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“It is the nature of love that makes us see our loved one in their uniqueness and individuality.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“The kind of lesson I had in spotting propaganda has long since dropped off the school curriculum. Yet it seems the time has again come when simple truths and basic human values need defending against the dangerous tides of hatred-spewing propagandists. Is it time again to bring back civics – lessons in speaking up, being a responsible citizen, and spotting today’s Big Lies?”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

“Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“In another timely insight, Frankl saw that a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are “guzzling away” without any thought of morality.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

“We also do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“Hitler had argued that people would believe anything if it was repeated often enough and if disconfirming information was routinely denied, silenced, or disputed with yet more lies.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“. . Whatever our future may hold: We still want to say “yes” to life, Because one day the time will come— Then we will be free! If the prisoners of Buchenwald, tortured and worked and starved nearly to death, could find some hope in those lyrics despite their unending suffering, Frankl asks us, shouldn’t we, living far more comfortably, be able to say “Yes” to life in spite of everything life brings us?”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“And, lastly, we know how much “morality” means: the unshakeable belief in an unconditional meaning to life that, one way or another, makes life bearable. Because we have experienced the reality that human beings are truly prepared to starve if starvation has a purpose or meaning.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty,”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

“It was 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’, so to speak.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

“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.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

“But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right then all our lives would be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else – preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which already seems obvious to us.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes To Life In Spite of Everything