Frankl writes: 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. Those most likely to survive the camps, Frankl tells us, were those who had a reason to keep fighting to live-a loved one, God, socialism, a vision of a future world they were fighting for. They saw a reason to keep going, so they took agency, even if only in tiny ways-like searching hard for that extra calorie to make it through one more day. Frankl writes: 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.
About This Quote
About Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl was a 20th-century Austrian neurologist. Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories. Read more on Wikipedia →