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Adversity
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What is to give light must endure the burning.
-Victor Frankl
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Attitude
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Our attitude towards what has happened to us in life is the important thing to recognize. Once hopeless, my life is now hope-full, but it did not happen overnight. The last of human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, is to choose one's own way.
-Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
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Choice
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A human being is a deciding being.
-Victor Frankl
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Doubt
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It is reserved for man alone to find his very existence questionable, to experience the whole dubiousness of being. More than such faculties as power of speech, conceptual thinking, or walking erect, this factor of doubting the significance of his own existence is what sets man apart from animal.
-Victor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1960
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Faith
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Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it-likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.
-Victor Frankl
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Fear
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Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.
-Victor Frankl
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Freedom
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The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitudes.
-Victor Frankl
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Holocaust
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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 one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way.
-Victor Frankl
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Life
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For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
-Victor Frankl
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If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.
-Victor Frankl
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Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
-Victor Frankl
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Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
-Victor Frankl
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Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
-Victor Frankl
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Mankind, Man
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Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is.
After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips.
-Victor Frankl
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Philosophy
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Man's Search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning... Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!
-Victor Frankl
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Purpose
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Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
-Victor Frankl
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Responsibility
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I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
-Victor Frankl
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Self Respect
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Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.
-Victor Frankl
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Books by and about Victor Frankl