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

"Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."

"Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."

"Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself."

"For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue...as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself."

"In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice."

"Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment."

"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."

"What is to give light must endure burning."

"The 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."

10 most powerful and thought-provoking quotes from Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl:

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that he and other inmates coped with the experience of being in Auschwitz. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest - and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Only those who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influence - while those who made a victory of those experiences turned them into an inner triumph. Frankl came to believe that man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.

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Viktor Emil Frankl M.D., Ph.D., 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 book Man's Search for Meaning (first published under a different title in 1959: From Death-Camp to Existentialism. Originally published in 1946 as Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager) chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus a reason to continue living. He was one of the key figures in existential therapy.

VIKTOR E. FRANKL

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