When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

I do not forget any good deed done to me & I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.

For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/…/, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost,...

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...

Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.

Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes… Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product,...

/…/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...

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.

I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially...

Preface to the 1992 Edition of Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning:”Again and again I therefore admonish my students both in Europe and in America: ‘Don’t aim at success – the more you aim...

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.

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

Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we...

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...

Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in...