"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl

Tonight I finished reading Viktor Frankl's famous book, Man's Search for Meaning. This book caused me to reflect quite a bit on where/how I find meaning in my own life. Since Frankl discusses his experiences as a prisoner in a concentration camp, I thought a lot about suffering and how I cope with suffering in own my life. I think that I often view myself as a victim when suffering occurs, but Frankl's text made me think about how I can view suffering in a more objective (and even positive) way. Although we cannot avoid suffering in our lives, we can derive meaning and depth of character through our sufferings.

I also have been able to look at my own problems and sufferings in a very different way, especially when compared to the experiences of prisoners in concentration camps. In many ways, I feel like I have no grounds to complain about my own problems and sufferings. They seem so trivial in comparison.

There are a lot of quotes that I like in this book, and I thought that I would record them here.

• "Dostoevski said once, 'There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings'" (p. 66).
• "Prisoners, too, suffered from this strange 'time-experience.' In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week! How paradoxical was our time-experience!" (p. 70-71). (I thought this quote was interesting because it reminded me of my mission. The missionaries would often comment to each other about how the days would drag on forever, but the weeks would fly by. Is there a parallel between missions and concentration camps?!? Eek!)
• "...we have already spoken of the tendency there was [for camp prisoners] to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist" (p. 71-72).
• "One could make a victory of those [concentration camp] experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate" (p. 72).
• "Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it" (p. 74).
• Nietzsche [wrote], "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how" (p. 76).
• A poet [wrote], "Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben" (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.)" (p. 82).
• "The person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? 'No, thank you,' he will think" (p. 121).
• "To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions" (p.130).
• "Man...determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment" (p. 131).
• "In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by the Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast" (p. 132).
• "Frankl was asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his life. He wrote the response on paper and asked his students to guess what he had written. After some moments of quiet reflection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, 'The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.' 'That was it, exactly,' Frankl said. 'Those are the very words I had written'" (p. 165, from afterward by William J. Winslade).