Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that's why we love it.

I resist all established beliefs. My religion basically is to be immediate, to live in the now. It's an old cliche, I know, but it's mine. I envy people of faith. I'm incapable of believing in anything supernatural. So far, at least. Not that I wouldn't like to. I mean, I want to believe. I do pray. I pray to something ... up there. I have a God sense. It's not religious so much as superstitious. It's part of being human, I guess ... Do unto others: How much deeper into religion do we really need to go?

I must not permit the evil capabilities of human nature to sour my faith in the tremendous good that is possible despite the frailty of that nature.

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

[Moishe] explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer.... And why do you pray, Moishe?' I asked him. I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.

Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.

As a boy I heard this story in church. A man was patching a pitched roof of a tall building when he began sliding off. As he neared the edge of the roof he prayed, "Save me, Lord, and I'll go to church every Sunday, I'll give up drinking, I'll be the best man this city has ever known." As he finished his prayer, a nail snagged onto his overalls and saved him. The man looked up to the sky and shouted, "Never mind, God. I took care of it myself." How true of us.

It is no natural for a man to pray that no theory can prevent him from doing it.

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

Man cannot live on the human plane, he must be either above or below it.

The best antidote against evils of all kinds, against the evil thoughts that haunt the soul, against the needless perplexities which distract the conscience, is to keep hold of the good we have. Impure thoughts will not stand against pure words and prayers and deeds. Little doubts will not avail against great certainties. Fix your affections on things above, and then you will less and less be troubled by the cares, the temptations, the troubles of things on earth.

There are two men in each one of us: the scientist, he who starts with a clear field and desires to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observations, experimentation and reasoning, and the man of sentiment, the man of belief, the man who mourns his dead children, and who cannot, alas, prove that he will see them again, but who believes that he will, and lives in the hope – the man who will not die like a vibrio, but who feels that the force that is within him cannot die.

God is better served in resisting a temptation to evil than in many formal prayers.

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

Pray for me that I not loosen my grip on the hands of Jesus even under the guise of ministering to the poor.

After a few days in hospital, I was thinking, Oh, gee - I raised in a church, Protestant upbringing which I'd rejected as an adult - I'm lying in bed thinking, Hmmm, maybe I ought to pray. They always say there are no atheists in a foxhole... and I thought, Here I am in a pretty good-sized foxhole... and I thought Naahhh. I wouldn't respect any God who would listen to me after I'd rejected him so vociferously.

We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

I think in a way, what it is to be human is to transcend our boundaries. That is the human story.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it hasn't got one.

I do pray. I pray to something...up there. I have a God sense. It's not religious so much as superstitious. It's part of being human, I guess.