Viktor Frankl

"It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future."

"We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life."

"Only by wading through the dark waters of despair can we ever hope to attain the bright shore of meaning."

"The more abstract the threat to our survival becomes, so too does the answer we seek."

"The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that he can take things easy now."

"I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the West Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the East Coast."

"Our main motivation is to find meaning in life."

"Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him."

"In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice."

"The prisoner who had lost faith in the future was doomed, with certainty some time in the next few days."

"Man can find meaning in life, in spite of death and suffering."

"It is a fact that among those who suffered in concentration camps, an unusual number had the most peculiar dreams."

"The will to meaning is even more fundamental than the will to pleasure or will to power."

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who gave away their last piece of bread."

"A successful man is he who receives a great deal from his fellow men, usually incomparably more than he has contributed to them."

"Man's search for meaning is a primary force in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives."

"By the unfree choice of their own attitudes they may nevertheless have been free, not entirely dependent on the biological, psychological and sociological conditions."

"The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected."

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

"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."

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response."

"Those who have a 'why' to live can bear with almost any 'how.'"

"In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning."

"Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones."

"The last of human freedoms is to choose one's attitude."

"A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who loves him, or toward any human being whose existence or destiny he makes his own, is bound by that very consciousness."

"What is to give light must endure burning."

"Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue."

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response."

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."