Man's Search for Meaning

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."

"The will to power and the will to pleasure are secondary to the will to meaning."

"We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when faced with a hopeless situation."

"A man's search for meaning is the primary human motivation."

"The meaning we give to our lives is what sustains us through hardship."

"Prisoners who lost faith in the future were doomed."

"The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has experienced, he has still retained his faith in life."

"Everything that happened to me happened to all of us."

"Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he is to become in the next moment."

"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness."

"Live as if you were living already for the second time."

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

"If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering."

"Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue from the pursuit of meaning."

"The last of human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance."

"When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept suffering as his task."

"No one can take away my freedom to choose my attitude."

"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality."

"The will to meaning can be frustrated, resulting in existential frustration."

"Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under the most constrained circumstances, decide what his life is to have been."

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

"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather a striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal."

"The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour."

"Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed; it is a quest for meaning."

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

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

"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."

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

"The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour"

"A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who loves him, or toward any human being whose fate depends upon him, and whose expectations are waiting for him to fulfill them"