Man's Search for Meaning:

by Viktor E. Frankl

 

Viktor Frankl shares what his experiences in Nazi Concentration Camps during World War II taught him about life. These experiences helped him boil life down to its simplest essence. The following is a series of quotes and pieces from the book: highlights. To truly understand Fankl's message, you must read and experience it for yourself.

 

The truth that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. 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. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

 

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living…Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

 

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future…And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence.

 

I remember a personal experience. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life. What would there be to eat tonight? If a piece of sausage came as extra ration, should I exchange it for a piece of bread? Should I trade my last cigarette, which was left from a bonus I received a fortnight ago, for a bowl of soup? How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment, which served as one of my shoelaces? …I became disgusted with the state of affairs, which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! …By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already part of the past.

 

Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how"…We had to learn ourselves and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us!

 

Please, read this book…it will change your life!

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