Mans Search For Meaning Quotes by Viktor E. Frankl, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Baruch Spinoza, Harold S. Kushner, Joseph Campbell, Mary J. Blige and many others.
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.
But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.
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.
It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. 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.
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
The more one forgives 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.
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Fundamentally, 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.
But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
