Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space where we choose our response.

The more, therefore, we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason

It's choice that makes us human.

Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, or that a ship provided with a compass can sail without a wind.

Reason also is choice.

But man is freer than all the animals, on account of his free-will, with which he is endowed above all other animals.

He who believes in freedom of the will has never loved and never hated.

I'd rather believe in my own choice and see it all go wrong than do something I'm not fully convinced of and later feel guilty about it.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.

The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

If I decide to be indecisive, that's my decision.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

The greatest power that a person possesses is the power to choose.