Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life.

I have a calling in my soul, if you like, to try to make my life in some way worthwhile. What is the value of my existence?

If you're alive, there's a purpose for your life.

Whenever you do something without asking yourself, "Why am I doing this?"-that is meaningless life... . The "why" of life makes it meaningful... . Only when an answer is given is one living life as a man.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

Pleasure is not the purpose of man's existence. Joy is.

The purpose of life is to live it.

A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.

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.

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

I think essentially the meaning of life is probably the journey and not really any one thing or an outcome or a result.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

You just decide what your values are in life and what you are going to do, and then you feel like you count, and that makes life worth living. It makes my life meaningful.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

It's not like during your normal day, anyone says, 'How do having meaning in your life? How do you make meaning in your life?'

I was looking for what the meaning of life was.

You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things, all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach.

We have no rational evidence that there exists another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.

We're all worm bait waiting to happen. It's what you do while you wait that matters.

The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. ...I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.