I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly – not miserably – knowing how to die.
He who knows the ‘Why’ for his existence is able to bear almost any ‘How’.
There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
I have known successful businessmen who, upon retirement, lost all zest for life. Their work had given their lives meaning. Often it was the only thing that had given their lives meaning and, without it, they spent day after day sitting at home, depressed, “with nothing to do.
Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz.
Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: 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 life.
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!” It seems to me that there is nothing which would.
Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.
When we set up pleasure as the whole meaning of life we insure that in the final analysis life shall inevitably seem meaningless. Pleasure cannot possibly lend meaning to life. For what is pleasure? A condition. The materialist–and hedonism is generally linked up with materialism–would even say pleasure is nothing but a state of the cells of the brain. And for the sake of inducing such a state, is it worth living, experiencing, suffering, and doing deeds?
He describes poignantly the prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die.
I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.
The choices humans make should be active rather than passive.
It insists that life is meaningful and that we must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances. It emphasizes that there is an ultimate purpose to life.
Let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering, provided certainly that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause be it psychological, biological, or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over his edema, by confessing, “I have wept it out of my system.” The.
With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end.
A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive – that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant.
Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors –.
Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why – an aim – for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence.
He yearned for privacy and for solitude. After my transportation to a so-called “rest camp,” I had the rare fortune to find solitude for about five minutes at a time.