Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of existential analysis, the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy". His best-selling book Man's Search for Meaningchronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate, which led him to discover the importance of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most brutal ones, and thus, a reason to continue living. Frankl became one of the...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth26 March 1905
CountryAustria
Viktor E. Frankl quotes about
The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing
To suffer unecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.
Between stimulus and response is the freedom to choose.
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.
The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.
Each of us carries a unique spark of the divine, and each of us is also an inseparable part of the web of life.
I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones.
Success, like happiness, is the unexpected side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
This is the core of the human spirit ... If we can find something to live for - if we can find some meaning to put at the center of our lives - even the worst kind of suffering becomes bearable.
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in its spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
Our generation is realistic, for 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, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
It is true that we can see the therapist as a technician only if we have first viewed the patient as some sort of machine.
In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.