The book is divided into two parts. First section chronicle the author's experience in the concentration camp and the second section describe how logotherapy can help man finds meaning for his life. Click here for more in depth reviews.
Quotes from Man's Search For Meaning that speak to me:
- A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy...through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
- Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation.
- 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.
- Man's will to meaning can also be frustrated, in which case logotherapy speaks of "existential frustration." The term "existential" my be used...to refer to...the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence, that is to say, the will to meaning.
- Having shown the beneficial impact of meaning orientation, I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the "existential vacuum."
- No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometime he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
- Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
- By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche...the more one forget 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.
- Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
- A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes...he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behave like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
- 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.
- When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves.
- 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."
- What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task . . . the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
- A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
- It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. 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.
- What matters is not the meaning of life in general but the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.
