Viktor Quotes & Sayings

Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Frankl, stated, ... man is by no means merely a product of heredity and environment. There is a third element: decision. Man ultimately decides for himself! — Alice A. Kemp

Do not make me laugh, stupid Jew." Pontius Pilate had said upon hearing Anna's explanation. "Your tribal God, Yahweh. Is a very weak God if he has allowed your people to become vassals of mighty Rome. — Viktor Shel

Pain from problems and disappointments, etc., is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice determined by whether you choose to compare your experience and pain to something better and therefore feel unlucky and bitter or to something worse and therefore feel lucky and grateful! — Viktor E. Frankl

Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I've ever read. It said "What is to give light must endure burning." It's by a writer named Viktor Frankl. I've been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring. In the end, I believe it's why we all suffer. It's the meaning we all look for behind the tragedies in our lives. The pain deepens us, burns away our impurities and petty selfishness. It makes us capable of empathy and sympathy. It makes us capable of love. The pain is the fire that allows us to rise from the ashes of what we were, and more fully realize what we can become. When you can step back and see the beauty of the process, it's amazing beyond words. — Damien Echols

Everyone has honour and a good name. It is the only sacred thing that every person has. — Viktor Shel

-I gave you your life.
-You gave me chains.
-I thought you would have learned by now after all these years; you cannot have one without the other. — Patrick Tatopoulos

I have excellent relationships with Jewish organizations and participate every year in a Hanukkah celebration with my family. There haven't been any anti-Semitic tendencies in my team for a long time. — Viktor Yushchenko

Man's search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life. — Viktor E. Frankl

I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable. — Viktor E. Frankl

A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive - that was unimportant; the life of a "number" was completely irrelevant. — Viktor E. Frankl

Consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn't it the same with life? Doesn't the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, it at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? — Viktor E. Frankl

Man can only find meaning for his existence in something outside himself. — Viktor E. Frankl

Rather it was being aware of what you were doing, where the sounds were coming from, what emotions they sprang from. And how your breath gave birth to the sounds. Much of what Peter sang that day, most people would have called noise. That didn't bother Viktor. It was the authenticity and the discovery that counted. — Alan McCluskey

Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time - inner time - which is a result of their unemployed state. — Viktor E. Frankl

And I quoted from Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger. — Viktor E. Frankl

As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou. — Viktor E. Frankl

Viktor was swinging a leather duffle and wearing a black Adidas tracksuit and his favorite brown UGG slippers with a hole in the toe.
"Worn and old, just like Viv," he'd say when Frankie made fun of them, and then his wife would swat him on the arm. But Frankie knew he was just joking, because Viveka was the type of woman you wished was in a magazine just so you could stare at her violet-colored eyes and shiny black hair without being called a stalker or a freak. — Lisi Harrison

To suffer unecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic. — Viktor E. Frankl

I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him. — Viktor E. Frankl

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself. — Viktor E. Frankl

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives. — Viktor E. Frankl

No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react. — Viktor E. Frankl

Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is properly done it brings happiness, and when carried out incorrectly it assuredly brings misery. Humanity! Your will is paramount! You can command Nature if you but obey her! — Viktor Schauberger

Even if you don't expect anything from life, doesn't life expect something from you? — Viktor E. Frankl

We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now. — Viktor E. Frankl

For me, there are no my people and strangers, no bad people and good people. All people are equal for me. — Viktor Yanukovych

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment. — Viktor E. Frankl

This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. — Viktor E. Frankl

LOVE 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 his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features 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. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true. In logotherapy, — Viktor E. Frankl

know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible." Is — Viktor E. Frankl

If I am a fool then it is no misfortune, for then only one more fool will wander this Earth. Amongst the millions of mentally deranged it would barely be noticed. But what if I am not a fool, and that science itself has erred? Then the tragedy is incalculable! — Viktor Schauberger

It is a gross overstatement, but in chess, it can be said I play against my opponent over the board and against myself on the clock. — Viktor Korchnoi

I do the unpleasant tasks before I do the pleasant ones. — Viktor E. Frankl

Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them? — Viktor E. Frankl

The purpose is so important that for it someone must sacrifice more than their life - they must sacrifice their honour and their good name. Are you ready for such a sacrifice? — Viktor Shel

Natural phenomena undisturbed by man point the way to the realization of a new technique. One needs a keen sense of observation. We must understand Nature before we can adapt its way of working to our needs. — Viktor Schauberger

Pain is only bearable if we know it will end, not if we deny it exists. — Viktor E. Frankl

If hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails. — Viktor E. Frankl

Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning — Viktor E. Frankl

Religion is the search for ultimate meaning. — Viktor E. Frankl

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. — Viktor E. Frankl

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating. — Dennis Prager

Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate. — Viktor E. Frankl

I don't study; I create. — Viktor Korchnoi

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. 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. — Viktor E. Frankl

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration ... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic. — Viktor E. Frankl

George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act. — Viktor E. Frankl

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. — Viktor E. Frankl

The innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a psychosis.
An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo.
Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist.
For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified. — Viktor E. Frankl

The revolution has been dubbed The Orange Revolution, orange being the campaign color of Viktor Yushchenko. The demonstrators say they are tired of living under a corrupt government. — Bob Schaffer

[M]an does not live by welfare alone. — Viktor E. Frankl

A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, "Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?" "I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran," said Death. — Viktor E. Frankl

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our — Viktor E. Frankl

You must learn to think one octave higher. Only then will you learn how implosion energy works. — Viktor Schauberger

The one thing you can't take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one's freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance. — Viktor E. Frankl

Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is. — Viktor E. Frankl

There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. — Viktor E. Frankl

Ukraine must once again be revered and respected by its citizens as well as the East and the West. — Viktor Yushchenko

God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies — Viktor E. Frankl

Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake. — Viktor E. Frankl

This is a unique deposit not just in terms of reserves, but also in terms of extraction techniques. Therefore there're grounds to talk about [applying] the Product Sharing Agreement. — Viktor Khristenko

Wine we need for health, and the health we need to drink vodka. — Viktor Chernomyrdin

I can feel sympathy for his loss and his pain without affecting who I am and my opposition to all that Viktor Kain is and stands for. When we lose our empathy for others and allow our enmity to spiral downward and twist into mindless hate, we are no better than the Viktor Kains of the world. Compassion is our strength, not our weakness." She paused. "And it is a treasure that is meant to be shared. Do you understand? — Lisa Shearin

[Speaking of his experience in a concentration camp:] As we said before, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal ... Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. — Viktor E. Frankl

He yearned for privacy and for solitude. After my transportation to a so-called "rest camp," I had the rare fortune to find solitude for about five minutes at a time. — Viktor E. Frankl

Our mothers and fathers want change. They worked all of their lives, but today live in destitution. — Viktor Yushchenko

As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. 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; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence. — Viktor E. Frankl

What I had done was nothing so extraordinary. I had simply taken [the prisoners] as human beings and not mistaken them for mechanisms to repair. I had interpreted them in the same way they had interpreted themselves all along, that is to say, as free and responsible. I had not offered them a cheap escape from guilt feelings by conceiving of them as victims of biological, psychological, or sociological conditioning processes. Nor had I taken them as helpless pawns on the battleground of id, ego, and superego. — Viktor E. Frankl

Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide — Viktor E. Frankl

Man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. — Viktor E. Frankl

It is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. Strangely — Viktor E. Frankl

No-one will be able to make us believe that man is a sublimated animal once we can show that within him there is a repressed angel. — Viktor E. Frankl

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always — Viktor Chernomyrdin

Logotherapy ... considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts. — Viktor E. Frankl

Viktor had been very sad about their grandfather's death, but Flora had intuited that it was less the person he grieved for than the fact of death itself. Death meant that people actually disappeared. That everyone was going to disappear — John Ajvide Lindqvist

Ukraine will be reforming its energy sector because we want to integrate into Europe, ... We have conducted all the talks and reached an agreement with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Poland and Georgia. — Viktor Yushchenko

If we wish to influence our own life in a particular direction, which is constantly threatened by the danger of the emergence of alien life-forms, and protect it from deterioration, then we must either allow Nature to rule or, if we wish to intervene, we must first acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of life. — Viktor Schauberger

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal — Viktor E. Frankl

Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind. — Viktor E. Frankl

It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. — Viktor E. Frankl

Improvising, I participated in the discussion, and questioned another woman in the group. I asked her how old she was and she answered, "Thirty." I replied, "No, you are not thirty but instead eighty and lying on your deathbed. And now you are looking back on your life, a life which was childless but full of financial success and social prestige." And then I invited her to imagine what she would feel in this situation. "What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?" Let me quote what she actually said from a tape which was recorded during that session. "Oh, I married a millionaire, I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men; I teased them! But now I am eighty; I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure! — Viktor E. Frankl

I believe that my handicap will only enhance my ability to help others. I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible. — Viktor E. Frankl

When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. — Viktor E. Frankl

Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him. — Viktor Suvorov

The last freedom is choosing your attitude. — Viktor E. Frankl

Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man. First — Viktor E. Frankl

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. — Viktor E. Frankl

A life of short duration ... could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years. — Viktor E. Frankl

Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner's psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell. — Viktor E. Frankl

I must furnish those, who would protect or save life, with an energy source, which produces energy so cheaply that nuclear fission will not only be uneconomical, but ridiculous. This is the task I have set myself in what little life I have left. — Viktor Schauberger

The consciousness of one's inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it? — Viktor E. Frankl

More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. — Viktor E. Frankl

The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. — Viktor E. Frankl

My dear lady, you have no idea just how scandalous I can be. ~Peter Viktor von Strassenberg, 1905 — Gwenn Wright

Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors - — Viktor E. Frankl

Earthly life is a temporary phenomenon only", Jesus said thoughtfully. "Death comes sooner or later to all mortals. It is honour that is the eternal thing. I asked you not about your life, but about your honour and your good name. — Viktor Shel

It was enough to drive me mad. I was no longer myself and yet I was so much more me than I had ever been before.
~Katherine Demure — Gwenn Wright

THE MEANING OF LOVE 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 his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features 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. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come — Viktor E. Frankl

I think it was Lessing who once said, 'There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose'. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour. — Viktor E. Frankl

We must improve our lives and we will do it together - all of our citizens and myself as president of Ukraine. — Viktor Yanukovych