Insofar as a sacrifice is “calculated,” performed after careful reckoning of the prospects of its bringing about a desired end, it loses all ethical significance. Real sacrifice occurs only when we run the risk of having sacrificed in vein. Would anyone maintain that a person who plunges into the water to save someone has acted less ethically, or unethically, because both are drowned?
I was horrified, but this was just as well, because step by step we had to become accustomed to a terrible and immense horror.
The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days – after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.
They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.
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.
To explain everything as the result of a single factor which, moreover, is fixed by fate, has a great advantage. For then no task seems to be assigned to one; one has nothing to do but wait for the imaginary moment when the curing of this one factor will cure everything else.
Love is living the experience of another person in all his uniqueness and singularity.
To be sure, man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health.
Even more powerful than fate is the courage that bears it steadfastly.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked – and behold, duty was joy.
He who has a strong enough why will find the how.
Meaning must be found and cannot be given.
Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.
My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience!
The kind of lesson I had in spotting propaganda has long since dropped off the school curriculum. Yet it seems the time has again come when simple truths and basic human values need defending against the dangerous tides of hatred-spewing propagandists. Is it time again to bring back civics – lessons in speaking up, being a responsible citizen, and spotting today’s Big Lies?
In another timely insight, Frankl saw that a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are “guzzling away” without any thought of morality.
As for the actual causation of neuroses, apart from constitutional elements, whether somatic or psychic in nature, such feedback mechanisms as anticipatory anxiety seem to be a major pathogenic factor. A given symptom is responded to by a phobia, the phobia triggers the symptom, and the symptom, in turn, reinforces the phobia.
We also do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.
Dari semua cerita tersebut, kita bisa menarik pelajaran bahwa hanya ada dua ras manusia di dunia ini, yaitu “ras baik” dan “ras buruk.” Kedua ras ini bisa ditemukan di mana pun; mereka ada dalam setiap kelompok masyarakat. Tidak ada kelompok yang hanya terdiri dari satu “ras”, yang baik atau yang buruk saja.
When, on his return, a man found that in many places he was met only with a shrug of the shoulders and with hackneyed phrases, he tended to become bitter and to ask himself why he had gone through all that he had.