When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

What is to give light must endure burning.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Life asks of every individual a contribution, and it is up to the individual to discover what that should be.

Meaning must be found and cannot be given; it cannot be invented, it must be discovered.

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

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.

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche.

Human existence cannot be meaningless. As long as we have breath, as long as we are conscious, we are responsible to answer the demands of reality.

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.

Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Therefore, we can predict his future only within the large framework of a statistical survey referring to the whole group; the individual personality remains essentially unpredictable.

Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining.

Freedom is the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness.

Decisions, not conditions, determine who a human being is.

Even under the most humiliating conditions, the inner freedom of the soul cannot be taken away.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but the last of the human freedoms.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

By his love, a person is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but ought to be actualized.

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers: The truth that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire.

The salvation of man is through love and in love.

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self.

Whether or not the beloved is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

Love is an act of seeing what is unique and irreplaceable in the other person.

To love someone is to enable them to realize their highest possibilities.

In love, a human being encounters another in their unrepeatable wholeness.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

Despair is suffering without meaning.

Suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.

Tragic optimism means that one is, and remains, optimistic in spite of the 'tragic triad': pain, guilt, and death.

It is not suffering itself that destroys human beings, but suffering without purpose.

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task.

Even a helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.

No one can relieve another of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph; he may turn his predicament into a human achievement.

Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.

The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.

Self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself, but only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.

A door of happiness opens outward; anyone who tries to pull it inward only shuts it more tightly.

Like an eye that sees everything except itself, the healthy human soul looks outward toward reality.

To live is to be questioned by life, and to answer is to live responsibly.

Man is responsible for recognizing the demands that reality makes on him at every single moment.

We do not invent the meaning of our life; we detect it.

Each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve.

The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. Many people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

Boredom is now bringing to psychiatrists more problems to solve than distress is.

People have enough to live by, but nothing to live for; they have the means, but no meaning.

Sunday neurosis is that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over.

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. The result is the feeling of ultimate and total meaninglessness.

When the will to meaning is frustrated, the will to power or the will to pleasure rushes in to fill the void.

No therapy can be truly complete if it treats the human being merely as a biological mechanism rather than a spiritual being capable of transcendence.

Psychotherapy has too long viewed man as a creature driven by base impulses; it is time to recognize man as pulled by higher values.

The feeling of meaninglessness is not a disease, but the most human of all achievements—the awakening of conscience.

Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish.

Conscience can be understood as the organ of meaning. It can be defined as the capacity to sniff out the meaning in each situation.

A man's character is shaped not by what happens to him, but by the attitude he takes toward what happens.

In the concentration camps, we watched our comrades behave either like animals or like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which is actualized depends on decisions, not on conditions.

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

There are two races of men in this world, but only these two: the 'race' of the decent man and the 'race' of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere.

No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of 'pure race.'

To be responsible means to be selective, to distinguish between the essential and the inessential.

A person who has a why can bear almost any how because his conscience illuminates the path ahead.

The voice of conscience does not command from outside; it calls from the deepest ground of personal being.

To live without values is to drift without a rudder in an uncharted ocean.

Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. 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.

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.

Humor allows a human being to put a distance between himself and his predicament, rising above his sorrow if only for a few seconds.

To smile in the face of misfortune is to assert the supremacy of the human spirit over external circumstance.

Self-detachment—the ability to laugh at one's own neurotic fears—is the first step toward psychological healing.

Paradoxical intention teaches us to confront our fears directly with a smile, stripping anxiety of its catastrophic power.

The human capacity for self-detachment enables man to look at himself, judge himself, and even laugh at himself.

He who learns to laugh at his symptoms has taken the first step toward leaving them behind.

A healthy mind does not demand the absence of trouble, but possesses the humor and resilience to face it.

Through humor, the soul reclaims its dignity even in the shadow of tragedy.

Usually, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he has salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys, and also his sufferings.

Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be wiped out. Having been is also a kind of being, perhaps the most secure kind of being.

Instead of envying the young for their possibilities, the old person can look with pride on the realities he has achieved, the values he has actualized, and the suffering he has borne.

The transitoriness of our existence in no way makes it meaningless. But it does make up our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transient possibilities.

Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentials: which of these will be condemned to non-being and which will be actualized?

Every moment holds thousands of possibilities, but we can only choose one to make real; all the others are lost forever.

Once an action has been committed, it is saved into eternity. It cannot be altered; it belongs to the irrevocable sanctuary of the past.

Do not fear the passage of time; fear only the squandering of the opportunities it offers.

The present moment is the golden seam where potentiality is woven into the tapestry of the permanent past.

Death gives life its true seriousness and urgency. If we were immortal, we could postpone every decision forever.

Man has the capacity to rise above his biological, psychological, and sociological conditions—and to defy them.

The defiant power of the human spirit is the ability to turn a tragedy into a personal triumph, an obstacle into an opportunity for moral greatness.

A person does not merely adapt to conditions; he actively creates his destiny through how he interprets them.

No situation is devoid of the opportunity for greatness. Even in the depths of sorrow, the soul may manifest nobility.

What is called for is not to endure fate passively, but to shape our attitude toward it with heroic resolve.

The human spirit is not determined by circumstances; it is revealed by how it confronts them.

Every human being is a sculptor, chiseling his own character out of the marble of hardship.

To say 'yes' to life is not to deny its sorrows, but to embrace them as the canvas upon which courage is painted.

In the final analysis, living is nothing other than taking responsibility for finding the right answer to its problems and fulfilling the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

Everything can be taken from a man but the unassailable sovereignty of his inner choice; in that choice lies his eternal freedom.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

What you seek is seeking you.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.