Viktor Frankl

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.

Viktor Frankl

To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.

Viktor Frankl

To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is rather that of an eye specialist than of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it, an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is.

Viktor Frankl

To suffer unecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

Viktor Frankl

We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.

Viktor Frankl

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

Viktor Frankl

What a man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

Viktor Frankl

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

Viktor Frankl

What matters is not the features of our character or the drives and instincts per se, but rather the stand we take toward them. And the capacity to take such a stand is what makes us human beings.

Viktor Frankl

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.

Viktor Frankl