Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy.
Between stimulus and response is the freedom to choose.
Our attitude towards what has happened to us in life is the important thing to recognize. Once hopeless, my life is now hope-full, but it did not happen overnight. The last of human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, is to choose one’s own way.
It said to me, ‘I am here – I am here – I am life, eternal life.’
You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me – and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!
Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
No one can take from us the ability to choose our attitudes toward the circumstances in which we find ourselves. This is the last of human freedoms.
No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies.
It is always important to have something yet to do in life.
Sports allow men to build up situations of emergency. What he then demands of himself is unnecessary achievement – and unnecessary sacrifice. He artificially creates the tension that he has been spared by affluent society.
Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find our goals and purpose in our lives that make even the worst situation worth living through.
There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.
Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.
Either belief in God is unconditional or it is no belief at all.
Man’s last freedom is his freedom to choose how he will react in any given situation.
No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.
I try to do everything as soon as possible, and not at the last moment. This ensures that, when I am overburdened with work, I will not face the added pressure of knowing that something is still to be done.
I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones.