More Quotes by Viktor Frankl
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 of it.
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. 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.
Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the web of life.
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
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.
Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.
When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.
