Man's Search for Meaning - Key Quotes
Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
Hi friends!
This week, I wanted to share some key quotes that capture the thoughts of Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. I am going to present them here without a lot of analysis. That will come later.
They are organized by the three main threads of his philosophy that I have identified, which are:
Responsibility
Making Meaning
Eternality of Meaning
I have been a cynic for most of my life. Frankl has inspired me to be a person that calls others to the greatest potential in themselves, which is only possible as an act of love.
Let me know what stood out to you!
Responsibility
Perhaps Frankl’s deepest belief is that we are all responsible for our own actions, down to the meaning of our life at every point in time. To him, Responsibility seems to be an absolute.
p77
We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life… Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
p109
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life.
p114
what never can be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end.
p131
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.
p150
Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
p153
Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur…
Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. … There, the “individual differences” did not “blur” but, on the contrary, people became more different;
p154
The world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
Making Meaning
Frankl believes that meaning is made by our response to life, rather than in life’s response to us. Each person’s meaning is personal to their task and situation.
p77
Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
p105
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal
p111
the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be.
p115
The question which beset me was, “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.
p152
Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless.
… therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with the cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism.
p158-159 (afterword, written by William J. Winslade)
Frankl also uses moral exhortation, however, to call attention to “the gap between what one is and what one should become” and the idea that “man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life.” He sees freedom and responsibility as two sides of the same coin.
p160 (afterword, written by William J. Winslade)
A positve attitude enables a person to endure suffering and disappointment as well as enhance enjoyment and satisfaction. A negative attitude intensifies pain and deepens disappointments.
Eternality of Meaning
The book contains some contradictory beliefs regarding the ineffability of a greater “super meaning” but still a need to look to the future. It contrasts the meaning of a life being made out of its parts with the meaning of life at any moment being given by your response to “life’s tasks.”
p73
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future—sub specie aeternitatis.
p76
Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts.
p77
These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way.
p78
Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying.
p92
We all said to each other in camp that there could be no earthly happiness which could compensate for all we had suffered. We were not hoping for happiness—it was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness.
p110
being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself
p111
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 this love he is enabled to see the essential traits and faetures in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.
p118
This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; … What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
Where is meaning?
p69
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously, I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’”
p134
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.