Best Of Viktor E. Frankl's "Embracing Hope"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & the Meaning of Life by Viktor E. Frankl

You see, there is also empirical evidence to the effect that teenagers are too much concerned with self-interpretation and self-actualization. Both, of course, are detrimental. They obviate what I call self-transcendence. You should, and may, actualize yourself. But you can actualize yourself only to the extent to which you turn outward! And even Abraham Maslow-the man who, more than anyone else, propagated and promulgated the concept of self-actualization-in his latest works before he died, was conceding and agreeing with my criticism: that self-actualization can never be aimed at as a target.

If you aim at it, you are missing it. The same as with happiness, with pleasure and so forth.

p. 63

Nobody can deprive and rob us of what we have put into the past. The deed done, a love loved, a suffering honestly gone through, is something indelible. We usually see only the stubble field of the past.

But what we don't see, what we overlook, is the full barn, are the full granaries into which we have rescued our past, our deeds, our experiences, our sufferings—the harvest of our lives.

p. 54

I recently had to address, as guest speaker, the annual meeting of the international PEN club-the international club of writers, novelists, playwrights and poets. And I implored these authors of novels and dramas and so forth, I implored them, "If you are not capable of immunizing your readers against nihilism and despair, please at least refrain from inoculating them with your own cynicism."

p. 50

Thereare three main avenues, as it were, leading up to meaning fulfilment. The first way, the first road on which you may arrive at meaning to find and to fulfil, is through work, through creating a work or doing a deed. Second, through love, through experiencing someone in his very uniqueness-and this means loving. […] And you may enrich your inner life also through experiencing something—culture, nature, art or whatever; through research, through experiencing something or encountering someone in his very uniqueness— in other words, through love. Work and love are the main avenues leading up to meaning. But, if need be, if you are confronted with a fate you no longer can change, if you are confronted, say, with an incurable disease, with an inoperable cancer, even then you may find a meaning. You may even find the deepest possible, the highest conceivable, meaning, because you then have an opportunity to bear witness to the human potential at its best, the most human of all human capacities, which is to turn a tragedy into a personal triumph, to turn your predicament into an achievement on the human level. In other words, life is potentially meaningful literally up to one's last breath, to the last moment.

p. 46-47

But, on the other hand, I would have to add, to push forward immediately by adding, that you cannot command, you cannot order anyone to believe. […] Belief, or faith, must grow within yourself-organically. You have to let it grow; you just shouldn't contribute to the repression of faith. But in principle each and every person can find a meaning in life.

p. 45

What I am saying is not that suffering is necessary to find meaning and to fulfil meaning, but what I am saying once and for all is that fulfilling meaning is also possible where we are confronted with a state of suffering, albeit only when this suffering cannot be actively removed in any other way. In other words, the priority is to change the situation, to actively intervene; but, where this is not possible, the superiority (i.e., the ethical superiority within the value hierarchy) shifts to the possibility of a person seeing an opportunity for meaning and fulfilling it, in spite of suffering and precisely in the midst of this suffering. Life is potentially meaningful, in extremis and in ultimis, in the severest states of suffering, in the bleakest conditions and, finally, even until just before death.

p. 25

Decent people are becoming disgusted with politics and are displaying a shameful tendency to hide their decency by only moving in their own narrow sphere. In a time where the word "idealist" has almost become a dirty word, people are tending to retreat within their own four walls—along with their goodness. And so we won't be surprised when we encounter the "type" of the young illegal trader who, with a lack of social responsibility, hawks his black-market goods in order to enable a better life for his family (and certainly not just for himself).

The main reason for this general aversion to politics is that party politics today is completely governed by utilitarianism in the way that it sticks to the party program and to its battle tactics. Its position is that the end justifies the means, a point of view that manifests itself in the opportunism of the party leaders as well as the "conjuncturism" of the party members. Above all, the aversion of many decent people to the machinations of party politics is grounded in total propaganda fatigue. All propaganda has been discredited by the events of recent years. Consequently, what remains can only be one thing: the propaganda of the role model! That lies in the hands of the educators. And something else: the propaganda of the conversation—a conversation between two people in camera caritatis—whether it's a conversation between a priest and a believer—or in view of the "migration of the Western population from the pastor to the psychotherapist" (Viktor Emil von Gebsattel) —a conversation between the neurologist and his patient.

p. 105-106

So, the relationship between freedom and responsibility manifests itself in the fact that freedom is not simply "freedom from" but also simultaneously "freedom to, and it's taking responsibility that is precisely what the human being is free to do. Thus, we have to oppose Freud's psychoanalysis with an analysis of being human in terms of being responsible. Nevertheless, this mode of being for man, which has its ultimate discernible foundation in the phenomenon of responsibility, is called existence.

p. 117