# Mans Search for Meaning ## Metadata * Author: [Viktor E. Frankl, Harold S. Kushner, and William J. Winslade](https://www.amazon.com/Viktor-E-Frankl/e/B000APVZJU/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) * ASIN: B009U9S6FI * ISBN: 080701429X * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U9S6FI * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI) ## Highlights Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. — location: [28](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=28) ^ref-6550 --- Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. — location: [29](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=29) ^ref-50011 --- Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. — location: [35](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=35) ^ref-53906 --- If my lack of emotion had not surprised me from the standpoint of professional interest, I would not remember this incident now, because there was so little feeling involved in it. — location: [343](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=343) ^ref-26008 --- In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way —an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. — location: [522](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=522) ^ref-7435 --- Any attempt at fighting the camp’s psychopathological influence on the prisoner by psychotherapeutic or psychohygienic methods had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward. — location: [946](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=946) ^ref-16587 --- Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. — location: [981](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=981) ^ref-51142 --- 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. — location: [1000](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1000) ^ref-24506 --- Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naïve 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. — location: [1013](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1013) ^ref-33574 life's meaning is not found in the achievement of goals but in the process of living your best life, in facing suffer ring, overcoming problems, and embracing joy. --- According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. — location: [1221](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1221) ^ref-22131 --- There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. — location: [1280](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1280) ^ref-51988 --- What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. — location: [1295](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1295) ^ref-24076 --- It 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. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning. — location: [1393](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1393) ^ref-15326 --- But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic. — location: [1395](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1395) ^ref-2186 --- weeks, months, years later, they told me, it turned out that there was a solution to their problem, an answer to their question, a meaning to their life. “Even if things only take such a good turn in one of a thousand cases,” my explanation continues, “who can guarantee that in your case it will not happen one day, sooner or later? But in the first place, you have to live to see the day on which it may happen, so you have to survive in order to see that day dawn, and from now on the responsibility for survival does not leave you.” — location: [1733](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1733) ^ref-13044 Live to search for a meaning which will come someday. Look forward to that day. --- Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief? — location: [1750](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1750) ^ref-48889 --- From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past—the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized—and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past. — location: [1828](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1828) ^ref-13356 ---