Man's Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 2006 edition; Part One tr. Ilse Lasch)

Their wordsDon't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.

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Their wordsThe salvation of man is through love and in love.

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

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Their wordseverything 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, to choose one's own way.

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Their wordsFundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.

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Their wordsThe prisoner who had lost faith in the future - his future - was doomed.

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Their wordsLife 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.

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Their wordsit did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly.

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Their wordsMan's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives.

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Their wordsmental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.

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Their wordsFor the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.

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Their wordsEveryone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.

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Their wordsIn other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

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Their wordsThe 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.

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Their wordsIt is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.

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Their wordsIn some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

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Their wordsMan 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.

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Their wordsIn fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

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Their wordsAfter 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.

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Their wordsBut happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.

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Their wordsAs to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.

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