I leave you the best phrases of Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, founder of Logotherapy who lived in several concentration camps. His best known work is Man's Search for Meaning.
You may also be interested in these psychology quotes or these on resilience.
- Death can only cause fear to those who do not know how to fill the time that is given to them to live.
-Man is the son of his past but not his slave, and he is the father of his future.
-The best way to achieve personal fulfillment is to dedicate yourself to selfless goals.
-The man who has not gone through adverse circumstances, really does not know himself well.
-What we really need is a radical change in our attitude towards life.
-The most painful aspect of the blows is the insult that they include.
- Luck is what one does not have to suffer.
-Abnormal reaction to abnormal situations is part of normal behavior.
-Happiness cannot be pursued, it must be followed.
-Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.
-I understood how man, deprived of everything in this world, can still know happiness -even if only momentarily- if he contemplates the loved one.
-If it is not in your hands to change a situation that causes you pain, you can always choose the attitude with which you face that suffering.
-Life demands a contribution from every individual and it is up to the individual to discover what it consists of.
-Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase her, the more she runs away. But if you turn your attention to other things, she comes and gently lands on your shoulder. Happiness is not an inn on the road, but a way of walking through life.
-The ruins are often the ones that open the windows to see the sky.
-The man realizes himself to the same extent that he commits himself to fulfilling the meaning of his life.
-The experiences of life in a concentration camp show that man has the capacity to choose.
-Live as if you were already living for the second time and as if the first time you had already acted as wrongly as you are now about to act.
-Love is the only way to apprehend another human being in the depths of his personality.
-The man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of mental independence, even in terrible circumstances of mental and physical tension.
-A man can be taken away everything except one thing: the last of human freedoms - the choice of personal attitude to a set of circumstances - to decide their own path.
-It is this spiritual freedom, which cannot be taken from us, that makes life have meaning and purpose.
-In declaring that man is a responsible creature and that he must apprehend the potential meaning of his life, I want to emphasize that the true meaning of life must be found in the world and not within the human being or his own psyche, as if it were It will be a closed system.
-A life whose last and only meaning consisted in overcoming it or succumbing, a life, therefore, whose meaning ultimately depended on chance would not be worth living at all.
- Ultimately, those responsible for the prisoner's most intimate state of mind were not so much the psychological causes already listed as the result of his free decision.
-The man who becomes aware of his responsibility to the human being who awaits him with all his affection or to an unfinished work will never be able to throw his life overboard. He knows the "why" of their existence and can bear almost any "how."
-From all the above we must draw the consequence that there are two races of men in the world and only two: the "race" of decent men and the race of indecent men.
-The final experience for the man who returns home is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he has to fear, except his God.
-Man's search for the meaning of life constitutes a primary force and not a "secondary rationalization" of his instinctual impulses.
- Ultimately, man should not inquire what the meaning of life is, but understand that it is he who is being asked. In a word, each man is asked about life and he can only answer life by answering for his own life; only by being responsible can you answer to life.
-Human goodness is found in all groups, even in those who, in general terms, deserve to be condemned.
-And at that moment the whole truth became clear to me and I did what was the climax of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I erased all previous life from my consciousness.
- Strange as it may seem, a blow that you don't even hit right can, under certain circumstances, hurt us more than one that hits the target.
-I want to show that there are times when outrage can arise even in a seemingly hardened prisoner, outrage not caused by cruelty or pain, but by the insult to which it is attached.
-I understood immediately in a vivid way, that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the countryside that surrounded us and to which I was about to return.
-I am only a small part of a great mass of human flesh… of a mass enclosed behind the barbed wire, crowded in a few earthen barracks. A mass of which a percentage is decomposing day after day because it no longer has life.
-Those who have not undergone a similar experience can hardly conceive of the soul-destroying mental conflict or the conflicts of will power that a starving man experiences.
-Despite the physical and mental primitivism prevailing by force, in the life of the concentration camp it was still possible to develop a deep spiritual life.
-I did not know if my wife was alive, nor did I have the means to find out (during the entire time in prison there was no postal contact with the outside world), but by then I had stopped caring, I did not need to know, nothing could alter the strength of my love, my thoughts or the image of my beloved.
-As the inner life of the prisoners became more intense, we also felt the beauty of art and nature like never before. Under his influence we came to forget our dire circumstances.
-Humor is another of the weapons with which the soul fights for its survival. It is well known that, in human existence, humor can provide the necessary distance to overcome any situation, even if it is only for a few seconds.
-All of us had once believed that we were "someone" or at least we had imagined it. But now they treated us as if we were nobody, as if we did not exist.
-The consciousness of self-love is so deeply rooted in the highest and most spiritual things, that it cannot be uprooted even by living in a concentration camp.
-I have found the meaning of my life helping others to find meaning in their lives.
-There is nothing in the world that enables a person to overcome external difficulties and internal limitations as much as the awareness of having a task in life.
-Don't aim for success. The more you aim for it and make it your goal, the faster you will lose it. Because success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, but has to be pursued.
-Success is obtained as an unintentional side effect of personal dedication to a cause that is greater than oneself, or as a product of one's surrender to another person.
-Happiness must pass, and the same happens with success. You have to let them happen without worrying about it.
-I want you to listen to what your conscience tells you to do, and go and do what your knowledge allows you. Then you will live to see that eventually - in the long run, I say - success will come because you stopped thinking about it.
-There was no reason to be ashamed of the tears, because they were witnesses that the man had had great courage, the courage to suffer.
-No one can be aware of the essence of another human being unless they love it. Through love, you are fully capable of seeing the essential traits and characteristics of the person you love.
-When you love, you see the potential in the person you love, who may not yet exist, but can exist. Thanks to his love, the person he loves makes the loved one aware of this potential.
-To a certain extent, suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it acquires meaning, as well as the meaning of sacrifice.
-I saw the truth that is in the songs of many poets and that is part of the wisdom of many thinkers. The truth is that love is the most important goal that a man can aspire to.
-I understood the meaning of the great secret of human poetry and human thought, and I believe it is my duty to share it: The salvation of man is through and through love.
-No man should judge unless he asks himself with total honesty if being in a similar situation, he would not have done the same.
-Life does not become unbearable due to circumstances, it only becomes unbearable due to the lack of meaning and purpose.
-Forces that are beyond your control can take away everything you have, except one thing: the freedom to choose how to respond to a situation.
-If there is meaning in life, then it must have meaning in suffering.
-We who live in concentration camps can remember the men who walked from barrack to barrack comforting others, giving away their piece of bread.
-The men who helped may be few, but they are proof enough that they can take everything from you, except the freedom to act as you want.
-The pessimist looks like a man who observes with fear and sadness that the calendar on the wall, from which he tears a sheet daily, becomes thinner as the days go by.
-The person who responds to the problems of life in an active way is like the man who removes each one of the calendar sheets and files them carefully, after having written some notes on the back.
-People who keep their "calendar" can reflect with pride and joy, on the life they have lived to the fullest.
-For someone who has lived well, does it matter if he realizes that he is aging? Do you have something to envy to the young people you see, do you cry for the lost youth, or for the possibilities of the young? No, thanks, whoever has lived well will say.
-I have realities in my past, not only realities of work done and love, but also realities of sufferings suffered in a brave way.
-Suffering is one of the things I am most proud of, even though it is something that does not generate the envy of others.
-I do not forget the good things they have done to me and I do not bear the resentment of the bad things they have done to me.
-I call it the transcendence of human existence. It explains that the human being always points and is directed by something or someone, in addition to himself.
-The more you forget yourself, the more human you are and the more you complete yourself.
-The consciousness of being is not a target that can be aimed at, for the simple fact that the more you aim at it, the less you will touch it.
-Man does not simply exist, but decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next instant. In this order of ideas, each human being has the freedom to change at all times.
-It is not freedom of conditions, but freedom to make a decision taking into account the conditions.
-In the concentration camps, we saw and witnessed comrades who behaved like pigs, while others behaved like saints.
-The man has two potentials within himself: to be good or to be bad. What it is depends on your decisions, not your conditions.
-The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things through the light of humor is a trick that is learned when the art of living is mastered.
-What is required of a man is not, as existential philosophers teach, that he support the nonsense of life, but rather that he support the inability to understand its unconditional meaning in rational terms.
-Everyone has a specific vocation or mission in life. Each person must carry out a specific assignment that asks to be completed. At that point, the person cannot be replaced by someone else to fulfill their task.
-We cannot judge a biography by its length or by the number of pages it has. We must judge it by the richness of content.
-Sometimes, the "unfinished" are the most beautiful of the symphonies.
-The human being is not one more thing among other things; things determine each other; but man, ultimately, is his own determiner. Whatever he becomes - within the limits of his faculties and his environment - he has to do for himself.
-Just as the sheep congregate timidly in the center of the herd, we also looked for the center of the formations: there we had more opportunities to avoid the blows of the guards who marched on both sides, in front and in the rear of the column.
-Many of the concentration camp prisoners believed that the opportunity to live had already passed them and, nevertheless, the reality is that it represented an opportunity and a challenge: that either experience can be turned into victories, life into a internal triumph, or you can ignore the challenge and just vegetate as most of the prisoners did.
-Those who know the close relationship between a person's state of mind - their courage and their hopes, or the lack of both - and their body's ability to remain immune, also know that if they suddenly lose hope and courage, it can kill you.
- An analogy could be established: the suffering of man acts in a similar way as gas does in the vacuum of a chamber; it will be filled completely and equally whatever its capacity. Similarly, suffering occupies the whole soul and the whole consciousness of man, whether the suffering is much or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative, from which it follows that the smallest thing can bring about the greatest joys.
-An active life serves the intention of giving man an opportunity to understand his merits in creative work, while a passive life of simple enjoyment offers him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment by experiencing beauty, art or nature. But the life that is almost empty of both creation and joy and that admits only one possibility of conduct is also positive; namely, man's attitude toward his existence, an existence restricted by forces that are alien to him. Creative life and enjoyment are forbidden to this man, but not only are creativity and enjoyment significant; all aspects of life are equally significant, so suffering has to be as well. Suffering is an aspect of life that cannot be eradicated,as fate or death cannot be separated. Without all of them life is not complete.
-The way a man accepts his destiny and all the suffering that it entails, the way he carries his cross, gives him many opportunities - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life. You can keep your courage, your dignity, your generosity. Or, in the tough fight for survival, he may forget his human dignity and be little more than an animal, as the psychology of the prisoner in a concentration camp has reminded us. Here lies the opportunity that man has to seize or miss the opportunities to achieve the merits that a difficult situation can provide. And what decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not is.
-We owe it to the Second World War to have enriched our knowledge about the "psychopathology of the masses", by giving us the war of nerves and the unique and unforgettable experience of the concentration camps. We have to learn for ourselves and then teach the desperate that it doesn't really matter that we don't expect anything from life, but if life expects something from us. We need to stop asking questions about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as beings to whom life continually and incessantly inquired. Our answer must be made not of words or meditation, but of upright behavior and action. As a last resort,Living means taking responsibility for finding the correct answer to the problems it poses and fulfilling the tasks that life continually assigns to each individual.