By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as if it were a closed system.

Man's Search for Meaning

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.

Man's Search for Meaning

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life.  Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment with demands fulfilled.

Man's Search for Meaning

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

Man's Search for Meaning

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone: and (3) by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.

Man's Search for Meaning

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

Man's Search for Meaning

There is no reason to pity old people.  Instead, young people should envy them.  It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future.  But they have more than that.  Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past – the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized – and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.

Man's Search for Meaning

For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy.  The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what?  Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for [italics by Frankl].

The Unheard Cry For Meaning

What threatens contemporary man is the alleged meaninglessness of his life, or as I call it, the existential vacuum within him.  And when does this vacuum open up, when does this so often latent vacuum become manifest?  In the state of boredom.

Psychotherapy and Existentialism

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. Man's Search for Meaning

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."

Man's Search for Meaning

Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: 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 personal 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. 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 about it.

Man's Search for Meaning

Pleasure is and must be a side effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

Man's Search for Meaning

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!

Man's Search for Meaning

Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.... 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.

Man's Search for Meaning

What is to give light must endure burning.

Man's Search for Meaning

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.

Man's Search for Meaning

The spiritual core, and only the spiritual core, warrants and constitutes oneness and wholeness in man.  Wholeness in this context means the integration of somatic, psychic, and spiritual aspects.  It is not possible to overestimate that it is this threefold wholeness that makes man complete.  In no way are we justified in speaking of man as only a “somatic-psychic whole.”  Body and psyche may form a unity – a psychophysical unity – but this unity does not yet represent the wholeness of man.  Without the spiritual as its essential ground, this wholeness cannot exist.

Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning

Education must be education toward the ability to decide. 

The Doctor and Soul.

Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love. Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex: rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of the ultimate togetherness which is called love.

Man's Search for Meaning

Like any kind of inflation – e.g., that on the monetary market – sexual inflation is associated with a devaluation: sex is devaluated inasmuch as it is dehumanized. Thus we observe a trend to living a sexual life that is not integrated into one's personal life, but rather is lived out for the sake of pleasure. Such a depersonalization of sex is a symptom of existential frustration: the frustration of man's search for meaning.

The Unheard Cry For Meaning

We must never be content with what has already been achieved. Life never ceases to put new questions to us, never permits us to come to rest. Only self-narcotization keeps us insensible to the eternal pricks with which life with its endless succession of demands stings our conscience. The man who stands still is passed by; the man who is smugly contented loses himself. Neither in creating nor experiencing may we rest content with achievement; every day, every hour makes deeds necessary and new experiences possible.

The Doctor and the Soul

 ^{Back To Top}