What is to give light must endure burning.
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
So 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!
Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.
The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Pain is only bearable if we know it will end, not if we deny it exists.
Pain from problems and disappointments, etc., is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice determined by whether you choose to compare your experience and pain to something better and therefore feel unlucky and bitter or to something worse and therefore feel lucky and grateful!
The last of human freedoms – the ability to choose one’s attitude, especially an attitude of gratitude, in a given set of circumstances, especially in difficult circumstances.
Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we many even try to predict the mechanisms or “dynamisms” of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.
It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
Man can only find meaning for his existence in something outside himself.
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.
I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run- in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
The more one forgets one’s own self, the more human the person becomes.
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.
Somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of ultimate purpose.
Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.