Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

My friends don't understand, whether it's belonging to a country club or playing golf, or whatever a vacation is, that should make you happy. And it's like, "No, happiness is much deeper." I think people have to struggle to find things that give them purpose, the real meaning. Why am I alive? Why did God bless me with these skills or these resources? What am I to do with them? If God just lets some person be very fortunate, let's say financially, it's kind of a funny God.

I have to have a meaning in my life. If I roam around without some meaning in my life, I'm in deep and serious trouble. I can't, I just can't exist.

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

If I have no children what would be the point of living.

All of us want to live, and that is absolutely natural. However, we should learn from childhood on to choose our best way to die. If we don't do that, we end up spending our days like a dog, only in search of harbour, food and expressing a blind loyalty to his owner in return. That isn't enough to make our lives have a meaning.

It's hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It's nice to think there's a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything in one direction, but that's not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives.

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

The greatest tragedy is not death, but life without purpose.

Life has meaning for anyone who takes an interest in it.

The purpose of life afterall is to live it.

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

Life's objective is life itself.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

The isness of things is well worth studying; but it is their whyness that makes life worth living.

The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life? That you are here - that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

Until we see love as the meaning of life, life seems to have no meaning at all. The sense of meaninglessness produces chaos, and the chaos produces fear. There is only one way out of this, and that is to see every moment and every situation as an invitation to love.

We all need a meaning to our life.

We won't fully experience joy until we've answered life's biggest question: Why am I here?

You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!

It seems that it is impossible to live without discovering the purpose of your life. And the first thing which a person should do is to understand the meaning of life. But the majority of people who consider themselves to be educated are proud that they have reached such great height that they cease to care about the meaning of existence.