Best Viktor Frankl Quotes

Viktor Frankl Quotes About Suffering, Hope, Life, Pleasure, Freedom, Success, Inspirational, Death, & Holocaust! Doctor Viktor Frankl, a pioneer in Existential Analysis, developed and popularized logotherapy. Frankl’s psychiatrist and neurology services are laudable for his contributions to psychotherapy and humanistic psychology. Most people associate him with the novel of the same name that made him an international sensation. On March 26, 1905, Frankl was born into a Jewish household in Vienna.

The city of Vienna, the cradle of modern psychiatry, encouraged Frankl’s interest in the subject from a young age. He was drawn to socialism because of his interest in people and their habits. Frankl sent a letter to famous psychiatrist Sigmund Freud when he was sixteen years old. After finishing secondary school in 1924, Frankl attended the University of Vienna and received a medical degree in 1926. His unique interpretation of Viennese psychology started to take shape during a public talk in 1926 when he coined “logotherapy.”

Frankl became the director of a Vienna mental unit for suicidal women after completing his medical degree in 1930. On January 1, 1940, Frankl was given the chief of the Rothschild Hospital’s neurological department. He would spend time in four Nazi concentration camps after his deportation, but Frankl would survive.

He was Executive Director of the Vienna Neurological Health Centre from 1969 to 1971. Oskar Pfister Prize for Psychiatry was awarded to Frankl, a non-American, after receiving 29 honorary doctorates and 30 books. While he was alive, Viktor Frankl gave lectures at 209 different colleges throughout the globe, from Harvard to Stanford, to name just two. Viktor Frankl died of heart failure on September 2, 1997.

Best Viktor Frankl Quotes

1. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl

2. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor Frankl

3. “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”  – Viktor Frankl

4. “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.” – Viktor Frankl

5. “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” – Viktor Frankl

6. “Religion is the search for ultimate meaning.” – Viktor Frankl

7. “Evermore people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.” – Viktor Frankl

8. “Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.” – Viktor Frankl

9. “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.” – Viktor Frankl

10. “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.” – Viktor Frankl

11. “No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.” – Viktor Frankl

12. “To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’” – Viktor Frankl

13. “If you call ‘religious’ a man who believes in what I call a Supermeaning, a meaning so comprehensive that you can no longer grasp it, get hold of it in rational intellectual terminology, then one should feel free to call me religious, really.” – Viktor Frankl

14. “A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.” – Viktor Frankl

15. “When a man cannot find meaning, he numbs himself with pleasure.” – Viktor Frankl

16. “God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies.” – Viktor Frankl

17. “View life as a series of movie frames, the ending and meaning may not be apparent until the very end of the movie, and yet, each of the hundreds of individual frames has meaning within the context of the whole movie.” – Viktor Frankl

18. “Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the web of life.” – Viktor Frankl

19. “The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing.” – Viktor Frankl

20. “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” – Viktor Frankl

21. “The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.” – Viktor Frankl

22. “We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: 1. by doing a deed; 2. by experiencing a value; and 3. by suffering.” – Viktor Frankl

23. “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.” – Viktor Frankl

24. “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.” – Viktor Frankl

25. “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” – Viktor Frankl

26. “Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.” – Viktor Frankl

27. “Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.” – Viktor Frankl

28. “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Viktor Frankl

29. “Faith is trust in ultimate meaning.” – Viktor Frankl

30. “Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.” – Viktor Frankl

31. “The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is.” – Viktor Frankl

32. “Pain is only bearable if we know it will end, not if we deny it exists.” – Viktor Frankl

33. “Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.” – Viktor Frankl

34. “Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.” – Viktor Frankl

35. “Even when it is not fully attained, we become better by striving for a higher goal.” – Viktor Frankl