Selected Quotes

Edited by Peter Y. Chou
WisdomPortal.com

p. 29: In some respects it is death itself that makes life meaningful. Most importantly, the tranistoriness of life cannot destroy its meaning because nothing from the past is irretrievably lost. Everything is irrevocably stored. It is in the past that things are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. Whatever we have done or created, whatever we have learned and experienced—
all of this we have delivered into the past. There is no one, and nothing, that can undo it.

p. 34: I see this as the key to my successes. When someone asks me how I explain my accomplishments, I usually say: "Because I have made it a principle to give the smallest things
the same attention as the biggest, and to do the biggest as calmly as the smallest."... I try to do everything as soon as possible, and no at the last moment. This ensures that, when I am overburdened with work, I will not face the added pressure of knowing that something
is still to be done... I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones.

p. 47: Once, when we were traveling upstream on a Danube River boat to a vacation spot (Eferding), I was lying on the deck around midnight. I glanced up at the starry sky above and thought of the principle within (to paraphrase Kant). I had the "aha experience" that nirvana "seen from within." I was convinced that there is some kind of universal homeostatic principle, that there is an overall trend in the universe toward some kind of "rest state" or equilibrium. [Kant quote: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me... I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence."] Kant's tombstone

pp. 50-51: Those who know me also know that my opposition to Freud's ideas never kept me from showing him the respect he deserves. When I was vice-president of the Austrian Society in Support of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I suggested that a campus building there, for which we were
seeking funds, be named "Sigmund Freud Hall."
    Not only did I correspond with Freud, but I met him once by chance while
I was a university student. When I introduced myself he asked immediately: "Viktor Frankl— Vienna second district, Czerningasse 6, door 25, right?" "Correct," I nodded. Apparently he knew my address by heart from our
long exchange of letters and cards.

p. 55: Power, schmower. I agree with John Ruskin, who once said: "There is only one power: the power to save someone. And there is only one honor: the honor to help someone."... As the Talmud says: "He who saves but one soul is to be regarded as one who has saved the whole world."

p. 56: The adult education school offered a philosophical workshop led by Edgar Zilsel. When I was 15 or 16 I gave a lecture there; the subject was "The Meaning of Life". Even at that early age I had developed two basic ideas. First, it is not we who should ask for the meaning of life, since it is we who are being asked. It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to these questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.

pp. 57-59: One day I passed Vienna's Votive Church (which I have always loved because it is "pure Gothic", though its construction was begun in 1856). I had never been inside. But my wife and I heard organ music, and I suggested to her that we go in and sit down for awhile. As soon as we entered, the music stopped and the priest stepped to the pulpit and began to preach. And he began to speak of the nearby Berggasse 19 [now Freud Museum] and of the "godless" Sigmund Freud who had lived there. Then he continued: "But we don't need to go so far, not to Berggasse. Right behind us, at Mariannegasse 1, lives a Viktor Frankl who wrote a book, Die ärztliche Seelsorge [literally, "the medical ministry", with the English edition title, The Doctor and the Soul]— a godless book indeed." The priest proceeded to tear my book to shreds. Later I introduced myself, a bit worried that this encounter might give him a heart attack. He certainly had not expected that I would be present... How minuscule is the chance that I would enter at exactly the moment when the priest mentioned me in his sermon? I think the only appropriate attitude to such coincidences is to not even try to explain them. Anyway, I am too ignorant to explain them, and too smart to deny them.

p. 64: Beginnings of Logotherapy— As early as 1929 I had developed the concept of three groups of values, or three possible ways to find meaning in life— even up to the last moment, the last breath. The three possibilities are: (1) a deed we do, a work we create; (2) an experience, a human encounter, a love; and (3) when confronted with an unchangeable fate (such as an incurable disease), a change of attitude toward that fate. In such cases we still can wrest meaning from life by giving testimony to the most human of all human capacities: the ability to turn suffering into a human triumph.

pp. 84-88: While still in Vienna, it was at the hospital that I met my first wife, Tilly Grosser. She was a station nurse with Professor Donath. I had noticed her because she looked to me like a Spanish dancer. But what really brought us together was her wish to take revenge for her best friend, whom I had dated but then dropped. I had guessed her motive and told her at once. That obviously impressed her. Beyond that I should say that the decisive part of our mutual relationship was not what one might expect. I did not marry her because she was pretty, nor did she marry me because I was "so smart"— and we felt good that these were not our motives. Of course I was impressed by Tilly's beauty, but her character was the real deciding factor— her natural intuition, her understanding heart. In December 1941, he married Tilly Grosser (p. 88: wedding photo of Tilly Grosser and Viktor Frankl, 1941).

p. 91: It was on the very first morning of my return to Vienna, in August 1945, that I learned that Tilly had died with many others after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by English soldiers. They had discovered 17,000 corpses and, during the following six weeks, another 17,000 prisoners died from sickness, starvation, and exhaustion. Tilly must have been among them.

pp. 93-94: Auschwitz— Dr. Joseph Mengele, one of the Holocaust's most notorious mass murderers, was selecting prisoners: to the right for labor in the camps, and to the left for the gas chambers. In my case, Mengele pointed my shoulder toward the left. Since I recognized no one in the left line, behind Mengele's back I switched over to the right line where I saw a few of my young colleagues. Only God knows where I got that idea or found the courage. Entering Auschwitz, when I was required to discard my own, perfectly good coat, I took an old, torn one. It had apparently belonged to a person who had been gassed. In a pocket I found a leaf, torn from a prayer book. On this scrap of paper was the principal prayer of Judaism, the Shema Israel ("Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God is One"). How else could I interpret this "coincidence" than as a challenge to me to live what I had written, to practice what I had preached?

p. 97: The two basic human capacities, self-transcendence and self-distancing, were verified and validated in the concentration camps. This experientail evidence confirms the survival value of "the will to meaning" and of self-transcendence— the reaching out beyond ourselves for something other than ourselves. Under the same conditions, those who were oriented toward the future, toward a meaning that waited to be fulfilled— these persons were more likely to survive. Nardini and Lifton, two American military psychiatrists, found the same to be the case in the prisoner-of-war camps in Japan and Korea.

pp. 106-107: In 1946 I dictated Man's Search for Meaning in nine days. As I dictated, I decided that this book about the concentration camps should be published anonymously, so that I could express myself freely. The cover of the first edition does not identify an author... Is it not strange that, among all my books, this is the one I wrote believing that it should be publsihed anonymously and that it should never bring me personal recognition? This is the book that has now been translated into 24 languages. It has been chosen five times by American colleges as "the book of the year." At Baker University, in Kansas, the entire curriculum for three years was given the theme and the title of the book.

p. 111: The sacrifices of Elly may be even greater than my own. So that I might complete my life's work, she has denied herself much. She is the counterpart to me, both quantitatively and qualitatively. What I accomplish with my brain she fulfills with her heart. Jacob Needleman once said, referring to the way in which Elly has been my companion on our lecture tours: "She is the warmth that accompanies the light."

p. 112: I have already confessed my perfectionism. But it is the kind of perfectionism Saint-Exupéry referred towhen he said: "Perfection does not mean that there is nothing more to add, but that there is nothing more to leave out."

pp. 113-114: Encounters with Philosophers— Among my most cherished experiences are my discussions with Martin Heidegger when he visited us in Vienna. He wrote in my guest book: "To remember a visit on a beautiful and informative morning." On a photo taken at a typical Viennese wine garden,
he wrote a sentence that was meant to point out the kinship between our philosophies: "Das Vergangene geht, das Gewesene kommt" [What has passed is gone, what is past will come]. Here, as in many other cases, my experience with great personalities whom I esteemed was that they were gracious toward me. They overlooked the inadequacies of my efforts, always seeing something positive in them— even though they had every right to be critical. This I experienced not only with Heidegger, but also with Ludwig Binswanger, Karl Jaspers, and Gabriel Marcel. Marcel wrote the preface to the French edition of Man's Search for Meaning. Karl Jaspers told me, on my visit to Basel: "Herr Frankl, I know all of your books, but the one about the concentration camp (pointing to it in his bookcase) belongs among the great books of humankind."

p. 124: Getting old is an aspect of the transitoriness of human existence. But this transitoriness can be a strong motivation for our responsibilities— our recognition of responsibility as basic to human existence. It may be proper to repeat the logotherapeutic maxim as I formulated it in a dream. I jotted it down when I woke up, and used it in The Doctor and the Soul: "Live as if you were already living for the second time, and as if you had made the mistakes you are about to make now." Indeed, one's sense of responsibility can be heightened by such a fictive autobiographical view of one's own life.

pp. 124-125: Audience with the Pope— In a private audience granted to us by Pope Paul VI (1970), I told him: "While others may look at what I may have accomplished, or rather at what turned out well by good fortune, I realize at such moments how much more I should have done, but failed to do. In other words, how much do I owe o God's grace, granted to me for all these years beyond the time I was forced to walk through the gates of Auschwitz." My wife Elly was with me for the audience with the Pope, and we were both deeply impressed. Pope Paul vI greeted us in German and continued in Italian, with a priest interpreter. He acknowledged the significance of logotherapy for the Catholic Church and for all of humankind. He also commended my conduct in the concentraion camps. As he signaled the end of the audience, and as we were moving toward the door, he suddenly began to speak in German once again, calling after us— to me, the Jewish neurologist from Vienna— in exactly these words: "Please pray for me!" It was deeply stirring. We could see in the face of this man the nightly tortures of his struggle with his conscience, as he wrestled with those critical decisions that made him, and the Catholic Church, unpopular. His face was carved with the strain of those restless nights.

p. 129: On another occasion I arrived at the clinic in the morning and was greeted by a small group of American professors, psychiatrists, and students who had come to Vienna to do research. I had just responded to Who's Who in America by returning the questionnaire they had sent. It had asked that I express, in one sentence, the meaning of my life. So I asked the group to guess what response I had made. Some quiet reflection. Then a student from Berkeley said, and his answer jolted me: "The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs." That was it, exactly. Those are the very words I had written.

p. 129: 1946. Surrounded by my medical staff, I made rounds in the neurology sections of the Policlinic. I had just left one sickroom and was about to enter the next, when a young nurse approached me.
She asked, on behalf of her supervisor in Oral Surgery, if I could spare a bed from my department for a patient who had just had surgery. I agreed, and she left with a grateful smile. I turned to
my assistant: "Did you see those eyes?" 1947. That nurse became
my wife. Eleonore Katharina, née Schwindt.

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