What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.
A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes-within the limits of endowment and environment-he has made out of himself.
These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning in life in a general way.
I would say that our patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful. Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.
Despair is suffering without meaning.
A sound philosophy of life, I think, may be the most valuable asset for a psychiatrist to have when he is treating a patient.
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.