I do not forget any good deed done to me & I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.
We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents…Sometimes the ‘unfinisheds’ are among the most beautiful symphonies.
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.
For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
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.
Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
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.
In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
A man who could not see the end of his”provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading” so that “he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives.
I think it was Lessing who once said, ‘There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose’. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour”.
Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative”.
As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.
When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
Each of us has his own inner concentration camp… We must deal with, with forgiveness and patience-as full human beings, as we are and what we will become.
Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of scarifice
Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.
Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.
We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright.
The truth-that love is the highest goal to which man can aspire.
He who knows the ‘Why’ for his existence is able to bear almost any ‘How’.
No-one will be able to make us believe that man is a sublimated animal once we can show that within him there is a repressed angel.
If you treat people to a vision of themselves, if you apparently overrate them, you make them become what they are capable of becoming.
We have absolutely no control over what happens to us in life but what we have paramount control over is how we respond to those events.
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.
A life of short duration…could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.
No one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them.
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.
The last of human freedoms – the ability to chose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
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.
Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
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.’
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
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.
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.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.
When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.
When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease such as an inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves.