Logotherapy Quotes

“Man is originally characterized by his "search for meaning" rather than his "search for himself." The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning

“As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he 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. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Some people say that a man dying in a sudden accident sees his whole life flash by, like a fantastically fast movie. To stay with this concept, one might say that in death, man has become the movie himself.
He now ‘is’ his life as he lived it, he is his own life history as it happened to him, as good as he has created it. Thus, he is his own heaven and his own hell.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“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, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Indeed, it is the lack of discrimination between causes and conditions that allows reductionism to deduce a human phenomenon from, and reduce it to, a sub-human phenomenon. Indeed, reductionism may be called sub-humanism. However, by being derived from a sub-human phenomenon the human phenomenon is turned into a mere epiphenomenon.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Meaning is missing in the world as described by many a science. This, however, does not imply that the world is void of meaning but only that many a science is blind to it. Meaning is scotomized by many a science.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“The more comprehensive the meaning, the less comprehensible it is. Infinite meaning is necessarily beyond the comprehension of a finite being. Here is the point at which science gives up and wisdom takes over.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“There is, indeed, what is called the wisdom of the heart. [...] A phenomenological analysis of the way in which the man in the street, out of the wisdom of the heart, understands himself, may teach us that there is more to being human than being the battleground of the clashing claims of Ego, Id and Superego, [...] and there is more to being human than being a pawn and plaything of conditioning processes or drives and instincts. From the man in the street we may learn that being human means being confronted continuously with situations of which each is at once chance and challenge, giving us a chance to fulfill ourselves by meeting the challenge to fulfill its meaning. Each situation is a call, first, to listen, and then to respond.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“Freedom is part of the story and half of the truth. Being free is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is being responsible. Freedom may degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Logotherapy claims that what are transitory and passing are the possibilities, the chances to realize values, the opportunities to create, to experience, and to suffer meaningfully. Once the possibilities have been realized they no longer are passing, they have passed and are part of the past—which means that they have been conserved; nothing can change them, nothing can make them undone. They remain for eternity.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“The, world is not, as a great existential philosopher has seen it, a manuscript written in a code we have to decipher. No, the world is no manuscript which we are asked to decipher, but cannot; it is, rather, a record which we have to dictate ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[L]ife continuously poses questions, it interrogates us, and we have to be responsive and responsible. Truly, life is a question-and-answer test.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Men, in general, misunderstand the meaning of death. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning and frightens us from our dreams, we regard this awakening as a terrifying intrusion upon our dream world and do not realize that the alarm arouses us to our real existence, our day world. Do we mortals not act similarly, being frightened when death comes? Do we not also misunderstand that death awakens us to the true reality of ourselves?”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Human responsibility rests on the ‘activism of the future,’ the choosing of possibilities from the future, and the ‘optimism of the past,’ the making these possibilities a reality and thereby rescuing them into the haven of the past.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Meaning is relative inasmuch as it is related to a specific person who is entangled in a specific situation. One could say that meaning differs in two respects: first, from man to man, and second, from day to day—indeed, from hour to hour.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“I, for one, would prefer to speak of uniqueness rather than relativity. [...] [M]an is unique in terms of both existence and essence. He is unique in that, in the final analysis, he cannot be replaced. And his life is unique in that no one can repeat it.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[O]ne may define values as those meaning-universals which crystallize in the typical situations a society—humanity—has to face.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“One may discern and distinguish three chief groups of values [,] creative, experiential, and attitudinal values. This sequence reflects the three principal ways in which man can find meaning in life: first, by what he gives to the world in terms of his creation; second, by what he takes from the world in terms of encounters and experiences; and third, by the stand he takes when faced with a fate which he cannot change. This is why life never ceases to hold meaning, since even a person who is deprived of both creative and experiential values is still challenged by an opportunity for fulfillment, that is, by the meaning inherent in an upright way of suffering.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[M]an never, or at least not normally and primarily, sees in the partners whom he encounters and in the causes to which he commits himself merely a means to an end; for then he actually would have destroyed any authentic relationship to them. Then, they would have become mere tools, being of use for him, but, by the same token, would have ceased to have any value, that is to say, value in itself.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[O]ur 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.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[M]eaning cannot be grasped by merely intellectual means, for it supersedes essentially—or to speak more specifically—dimensionally, man’s capacity as a finite being. [...] This meaning necessarily transcends man and his world and, therefore, cannot be approached by merely rational processes. [...] [W]hat we have to deal with is no intellectual or rational process, but a wholly existential act which perhaps could be described by [...] ‘the basic trust in Being’.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[W]hat matters is not the meaning of man’s life in general. To look for the general meaning of man’s life would be comparable to the question put to a chess player: “What is the best move?” There is no move at all, irrespective of the concrete situation of a special game. The same holds for human existence inasmuch as one can search only for the concrete meaning of personal existence, a meaning which changes from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“True human wholeness must include the spiritual as an essential element. Moreover, the spiritual is precisely that constituent which is primarily responsible for the unity of man.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Psychotherapy is like an equation with two unknowns—Psi equals x plus y. The one unknown is that ever variable and incalculable factor, the personality of the Doctor, and the other unknown is the individuality of the patient.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Psychotherapy cannot rest content with making man capable of enjoying pleasure or of doing a day’s work; it must also make him capable of bearing suffering, in a very definite sense.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Modern man needs to be considered as more than a psycho-physical reality. His spiritual existence cannot be neglected. He is not a mere organism. He is a person.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Our industrialized society is out to satisfy all needs, and our consumer society is even out to create needs in order to satisfy them; but the most human of all human needs—the need to see a meaning in one‘s life—remains unsatisfied. People may have enough to live by; but more often than not they do not have anything to live for.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“[M]an is by no means a product of inheritance and environment. Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end education is just education towards the ability to decide.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy

“Reality presents itself always in the form of a specific concrete situation, and since each life situation is unique, it follows that also the meaning of a situation must be unique. Therefore it would not even be possible for meanings to be transmitted through traditions. Only values– which might be defined as universal meanings— can be affected by the decay of traditions… to put it succinctly: the values are dead–long live the meanings.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning

“Psychotherapy endeavors to bring instinctual facts to consciousness. Logotherapy, on the other hand, seeks to bring to awareness the spiritual realities. As existential analysis it is particularly concerned with making men conscious of their responsibility-- since being responsible is one of the essential grounds of human existence. If to be human is, as we have said, to be conscious and responsible, then existential analysis is psychotherapy whose starting-point is consciousness of responsibility.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded