By Viktor Frankl
Primarily it’s an account of Frankl’s experience in Nazi concentration camps. In those brutal conditions, Frankl finds meaning in suffering which contributes to his survival where others gave up. He repeatedly clarifies that meaning does not require suffering and that unnecessary is to be avoided.
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 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 about it.
page xiv in the preface to the 1992 edition
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of this beloved.
page 37
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.
page 66
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here–I am here–I am life, eternal life.'”
page 69
I happened across the above quote in close proximity to hearing a similar interaction with a tree described in The Myth of Normal. Unfortunately, consuming The Myth of Normal as an audiobook made it harder for me to grab the exact quote. It makes me think about communing with nature and how I could do more of it.
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!
page 109
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself–be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself–by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love–the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
page 110
But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering–provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
page 113
I wonder what Frankl would say about David Goggins. Is he only a masochist? Was suffering unavoidable for him, so he just picked his flavor, and therefore it has meaning? I don’t think a reasonable person would say that Goggins’ story is devoid of meaning, but at the same time he clearly subjects himself to suffering that could be avoided. Is it that the actions themselves already have purpose and meaning and the suffering just happens to be part of the journey? Maybe I’m asking a dumb question.
After a while I proceeded to another question, this time addressing myself to the whole group. The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with its limited intelligence, it could not enter into the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable. The I pushed forward with the following question: “And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?”
page 118
A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes–within the limits of endowment and environment–he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, mean is that being who invented the gas chambers of Aushwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
page 134
Perhaps Robert Sapolsky would argue that the saints and swine were separated by earlier factors than the camps but were deterministic all the same. I’m interested to read Determined.
Fifty years ago, I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called “unemployment neurosis.” And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries and the like–in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity–their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.
page 140
Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sports figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
page 148
From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past–the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized–and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.
page 151
I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one
page 162
Not there, but I try to get closer.