Quotes

"Gratitude for Viktor Frankl" by Peg Melnik, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 9, 2014. 

The one thing you can't take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me.

Success, like happiness, is the unexpected side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.

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.

Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.

"This Man Faced Unimaginable Suffering, And Then Wrote The Definitive Book About Happiness" by Carolyn Gregoire, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 4, 2014. 

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

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 the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

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 own life.

When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats.

Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe.... The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss ... and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange anomalities, weird vegetation, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.

God has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring--it is his will that we should love.

Men are still men. The despot's wickedness, Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess-- Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.

Above all, you can believe in Providence in either of two ways, either as thirst believes in the orange, or as the ass believes in the whip.

You say "society must exact vengeance, and society must punish." Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.