The Wisdom of Viktor Frankl

What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves, and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that 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 answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks that it constantly sets forth for each individual.


...morality is more than just a sleeping pill, or a tranquilizing drug.


What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.


All quotations from Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl's reflections on life in a concentration camp)