Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

— Viktor E. Frankl

Was Du Ernest, Kane Kane Yacht her Welt Dir Reuben. (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 may have had and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

— Viktor E. Frankl

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 'unfinished' are among the most beautiful symphonies.

— Viktor E. Frankl

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 need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—hourly and daily. 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 task which it constantly sets for each individual.

— Viktor E. Frankl

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.

— Viktor E. Frankl

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.

— Viktor E. Frankl

We have to consider that a man who has been under such enormous mental pressure for such a long time is naturally in some danger after his liberation, especially since the pressure was released quite suddenly. This danger (in the sense of psychological hygiene) is the psychological counterpart of the bends. Just as the physical health of the caisson worker would be endangered if he left his diver's chamber suddenly (where he is under enormous atmospheric pressure), so the man who has suddenly been liberated from mental pressure can suffer damage to his moral and spiritual health.

— Viktor E. Frankl

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

— Viktor E. Frankl

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few, but they offer sufficient proof that 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.

— Viktor E. Frankl

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.

— Viktor E. Frankl