Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist, neurologist, and Holocaust survivor renowned for his development of logotherapy. His seminal work, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” draws from his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, emphasizing the human quest for meaning even in extreme suffering. Frankl argues that individuals can find purpose by choosing their attitude toward adversity and seeking deeper meaning in life. He contends that the pursuit of meaning is a fundamental human motivation, influencing mental well-being. His philosophy, rooted in existential psychology, highlights the importance of personal responsibility and the ability to transcend difficult circumstances through a meaningful life. Frankl’s legacy endures in the field of psychotherapy, inspiring countless individuals to find purpose and resilience in the face of life’s challenges.
Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
1. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
2. “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
3. “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
4. “When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
5. “What is to give light must endure burning.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
6. “Between stimulus and response is the freedom to choose.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
7. “It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
8. “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
9. “So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
— Viktor E. Frankl
10. “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
11. “No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
12. “Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find our goals and purpose in our lives that make even the worst situation worth living through.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
13. “Man’s search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
14. “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
15. “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
16. “Despair is suffering without meaning.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
17. “Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
18. “What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
19. “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
20. “The meaning of my life is to help others find meaning in theirs.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
21. “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
22. “The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
23. “Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
24. “Pain from problems and disappointments, etc., is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice determined by whether you choose to compare your experience and pain to something better and therefore feel unlucky and bitter or to something worse and therefore feel lucky and grateful!”
— Viktor E. Frankl
25. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
26. “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
27. “In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
28. “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
29. “You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me – and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!”
— Viktor E. Frankl
30. “If we take a man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be we make him capable of becoming what he can be.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
31. “Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
32. “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
33. “Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
34. “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
35. “The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
36. “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
37. “View your life from your funeral, looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn’t? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what you wouldn’t.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
38. “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
39. “The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
40. “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
41. “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. 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 E. Frankl
42. “Self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself, but only as a side effect of self-transcendence.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
43. “When man can’t find meaning in his life, he distracts himself with pleasure.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
44. “The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
45. “Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
46. “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how”.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
47. “Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
48. “Pain is only bearable if we know it will end, not if we deny it exists.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
49. “There are two races of men in this world but only these two: the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
50. “For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
51. “The last of human freedoms – the ability to choose one’s attitude especially an attitude of gratitude in a given set of circumstances especially in difficult circumstances.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
52. “I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run- in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
53. “There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
54. “I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
55. “We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: 1. by doing a deed; 2. by experiencing a value; and 3. by suffering.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
56. “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
57. “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
58. “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
59. “For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
60. “It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
61. “Even when it is not fully attained, we become better by striving for a higher goal.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
62. “You don’t create your mission in life – you detect it.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
63. “At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
64. “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
65. “Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
66. “Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
67. “Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
68. “Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it – likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
69. “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
70. “What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
71. “A human being is a deciding being.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
72. “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
73. “Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
74. “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
75. “And I quoted from Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
76. “Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
77. “I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
78. “Either belief in God is unconditional or it is no belief at all.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
79. “View life as a series of movie frames, the ending and meaning may not be apparent until the very end of the movie, and yet, each of the hundreds of individual frames has meaning within the context of the whole movie.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
80. “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
81. “The more one forgets one’s own self, the more human the person becomes.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
82. “Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
83. “It is always important to have something yet to do in life.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
84. “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
85. “Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
86. “It is the pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
87. “As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
88. “The more one forgives himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
89. “I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
90. “I would say that our 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. 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
91. “Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
92. “It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
93. “The struggle for existence is a struggle ‘for’ something; it is purposeful and only in so being is it meaningful and able to bring meaning into life.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
94. “The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
95. “Man can only find meaning for his existence in something outside himself.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
96. “Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
97. “Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
98. “The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
99. “He who knows the ‘Why’ for his existence is able to bear almost any ‘How’.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
100. “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
101. “No one can take from us the ability to choose our attitudes toward the circumstances in which we find ourselves. This is the last of human freedoms.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
102. “Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
103. “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
104. “Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
105. “Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
106. “God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
107. “Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
108. “Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
109. “Life asks of every individual a contribution, and it is up to that individual to discover what it should be.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
110. “Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
111. “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
112. “Our attitude towards what has happened to us in life is the important thing to recognize. Once hopeless, my life is now hope-full, but it did not happen overnight. The last of human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, is to choose one’s own way.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
113. “Once an individual’s search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
114. “Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
115. “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
116. “Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
117. “It isn’t the past which holds us back, it’s the future; and how we undermine it, today.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
118. “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 E. Frankl
119. “Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
120. “Nothing is likely to help a person overcome or endure troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
121. “As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
122. “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 one’s life.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
123. “I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
124. “Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
125. “Logotherapy bases its technique called “paradoxical intention” on the twofold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
126. “Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
127. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
128. “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
129. “Man’s last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
130. “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
131. “The pleasure principle is an artificial creation of psychology. Pleasure is not the goal of our aspirations, but the consequence of attaining them.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
132. “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
133. “The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
134. “A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
135. “Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in its spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
136. “No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
137. “Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. “Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
138. “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
139. “Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
140. “I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
141. “Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument – they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
142. “Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
143. “If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
144. “Somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of ultimate purpose.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
145. “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 E. Frankl
146. “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 one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
147. “Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
148. “They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
149. “In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
150. “Their question was, “Will we survive the camp? For, if not, all this suffering has no meaning.” The question which beset me was, “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning”. For, if not, the ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance-as whether one escapes or not-ultimately would not be worth living at all.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
