568 Quotes by Viktor E. Frankl

As soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and instead tries to ridicule them by dealing with them in an ironic way - by applying paradoxical intention - the vicious circle is cut, the symptom diminishes and finally atrophies.

[I]n the last resort, man should not ask "What is the meaning of my life?" but should realize that he himself is being questioned. Life is putting its problems to him, and it is up to him to respond to these questions by being responsible; he can only answer to life by answering for his life.

[M]an is by no means merely a product of heredity and environment. There is a third element: decision. Man ultimately decides for himself! And, in the end, education must be education toward the ability to decide.

[I]t is a matter of indifference what a person's occupation is, or at what job he works. The crucial thing is how he works, whether he in fact fills the place in which he happens to have landed. The radius of his activity is not important; important alone is whether he fills the circle of his tasks.

For too long a time--for half a century, in fact--psychiatry tried to interpret the human mind merely as a mechanism, and consequently the therapy of mental disease merely in terms of technique. I believe this dream has been dreamt out. What now begins to loom on the horizon is not psychologized medicine but rather those of human psychiatry.

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.

Pleasure is, and must remain, a side effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

[M]an does not live by welfare alone.

The innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a psychosis.An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo.Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.