Man’s Search for Meaning
Few books confront suffering with the honesty and hope found in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Drawing from his years in Auschwitz, Frankl shows that even in the darkest conditions, the human spirit can choose purpose, dignity, and meaning. The excerpts below capture the heart of his message—we can find meaning and purpose in work, in love, and even in pain.
Quotes to Consider from Man’s Search for Meaning
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man 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.”
“The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed.”
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. 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.”
“It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”
“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.”
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
“Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it wqould be easy to condemn.
“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.”