Quotes

„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."

„He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

Frankl often quoted this thought of Nietzsche's as a motto of logotherapy.

„When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

„Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked."

„Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

The so-called categorical imperative of logotherapy.

„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 - as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself."

„Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire."

„The Statue of Liberty on the East Coast should be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast."

„Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."

„Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response."

This sentence does not appear in Frankl's works. It was popularised by Stephen Covey, who said he had read it in an unidentified book; it nevertheless captures the spirit of logotherapy well.