Top 10 Best Viktor Frankl Quotes

Frankl became the founder of logotherapy, a school of thought based on the idea that the primary driving force in human beings is the search for meaning. His most famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is not about suffering, but about inner freedom: even in the harshest conditions, a person retains the ability to choose their attitude toward life.

His ideas are simple yet profound: life does not ask, “What do you want?”—it asks, “What are you willing to live for?” Frankl showed that purpose is not something external. It is something that arises from within, the moment you discover your own meaning.

Here are the top 10 quotes by Viktor Frankl:

• ” When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
• “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
• “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how‘.'”
• “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
• “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
• “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”                       
• “The meaning of life is to give life meaning.”
• “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
• “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. 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.””
• “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!” It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended.”