Emily

“More and more, a doctor is confronted with the questions: What is life? What is suffering after all? Indeed, incessantly and continually a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms. Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest or rabbi in former days, but now they often refuse to be handed over to a clergyman, so that the doctor is confronted with philosophical questions rather than emotional conflicts.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Don't you think it's rather nice to think that we're in a book that God's writing? If I were writing the book, I might make mistakes. But God knows how to make the story end just right— in the way that's best for us."

"Do you really believe that, Mother?" Peter asked quietly.

"Yes," she said, "I do believe it— almost always— except when I'm so sad that I can't believe anything. But even when I can't believe it, I know it's true— and I try to believe.”
― E. Nesbit, The Railway Children

“After the carnage, smoke and ash of the last few days, the mountains never looked so beautiful or dependable. That Chinese poet had expressed it well: ‘Though the nation go under, the mountains and streams remain.’ Though men explode atom bombs, God’s sunlight never fails.

Scientist Nagai corrected that thought: ‘The sun’s fuel is already half spent, and one day sunlight will disappear and the green mountains around me will die, just as surely as my wife died and my books and medals turned to ash.’ His copy of the New Testament had also turned to ash, but as he walked, a verse from it took hold of his heart: ‘The heavens and the earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.’ There it was, the truth more reliable than mountains and sunlight, and the answer to the horror and sadness of August 9th.”
― Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb

“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. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. What man actually needs 1s 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. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning