Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it.

Everything I do is somehow rooted in humanity. It's always about people; it's always about ego. It's always about desperation. It's quite existential. You know, 'Am I leading a good life?' That might be because I'm an atheist, and I think this is all we've got, so you better be nice. And have fun.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Most people's lives are nothing more than pointlessly frantic activity used as a psychological defense against their own impotence and fear.

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.

Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't.

Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.

Man ought always to have something that he prefers to life; otherwise life itself will seem to him tiresome and void.

Fashion has always been my defense mechanism.

Live is meaningful only if you gave it a meaning.

But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.

A lot of writers tired of doing kind of hip, slick, funny, dark, exploding hypocrisy, underlining once again the point that life is a farce and we're all in it for ourselves and that the point of life is to amass as much money/fame/sexual gratification, you know, whatever your personal thing is, and that everything else is just glitter or PR image - that we're tired of sort of doing that stuff over and over again.

As far as I'm concerned, humans have not yet come up with a belief that's worth believing.

Sorrow comes with so many defense mechanisms. You have your shock, your denial, your getting wasted, your cracking jokes, and your religion. You also have the old standby catchall—the blind belief in fate, the whole "things happening for a reason" drill.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

Life is nothing in itself. It’s a place marker that proves who’s winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing but the winning. Even winning means nothing. We win because it’s an insult to lose. The ends don’t justify the means. The means don’t justify the ends. There is no one to justify to. There is no justice.” ~ Durzo Blint

We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

We don’t ask to be eternal beings. We only ask that things do not lose all their meaning.

I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason.

You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live.

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?