Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.
Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?
When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.
There are two races of men in this world but only these two: the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
You don’t create your mission in life – you detect it.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
It isn’t the past which holds us back, it’s the future; and how we undermine it, today.
Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
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 own life.
It is true that we can see the therapist as a technician only if we have first viewed the patient as some sort of machine.
Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
Life asks of every individual a contribution, and it is up to that individual to discover what it should be.
Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
The more one forgives 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.
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.
For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.