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 life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. — *location: 28* ^ref-46354 --- Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. — *location: 35* ^ref-53906 --- “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself — *location: 80* ^ref-35574 --- If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. — *location: 879* ^ref-33738 --- Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. — *location: 963* ^ref-39376 --- We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. — *location: 998* ^ref-17721 --- Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. — *location: 1000* ^ref-24506 --- A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.” — *location: 1034* ^ref-35550 --- Again I quoted a poet—to avoid sounding like a preacher myself—who had written, “Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.” (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) — *location: 1067* ^ref-35119 --- What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. — *location: 1295* ^ref-48835 --- No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). — *location: 1310* ^ref-63622 --- In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress. And these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time. — *location: 1315* ^ref-37260 --- One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence. — *location: 1338* ^ref-38085 --- This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” — *location: 1345* ^ref-35591 --- Such a precept confronts him with life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself. — *location: 1348* ^ref-22429 --- The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. — *location: 1362* ^ref-27161 --- What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence. — *location: 1363* ^ref-32184 --- The second way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something—such as goodness, truth and beauty—by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness—by loving him. — *location: 1368* ^ref-3870 --- Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being. — *location: 1483* ^ref-54895 --- On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.” — *location: 1487* ^ref-9730 --- It is not the neurotic’s self-concern, whether pity or contempt, which breaks the circle formation; the cue to cure is self-transcendence! — *location: 1577* ^ref-31102 --- Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. — *location: 1617* ^ref-58864 ---