#psychology

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human fundamental proposition.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been injured.

One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.

The mother of excess is not joy, but joylessness.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

A healthy person does not torture others—generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

We need more psychology, we need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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