The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing.
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.
The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
If there is 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.
If we take a man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be we make him capable of becoming what he can be.
Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it – likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.
Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.
Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
Nothing is likely to help a person overcome or endure troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life.
The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.
The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
A human being is a deciding being.
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.