Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

“We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright.”

“There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things.”

“A man's a man for a' that!”

“The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.”

“A man who is deprived of criticisms is a miserable and a poor man”

“Wise man is a wing; stupid man is a hole! You meet a wise man, you rise, you meet a stupid man, and you fall!”

“Black man cleans the streets but mustn't walk freely on the pavement”

“It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.”

“Man has not forgotten to be man because man has not yet learned to be man! You can’t forget the thing you haven’t learned yet!”

“I have the soul of a white man, the soul of a black man, the soul of an Asian man; the soul of every man.”