Work
Man's Search for Meaning
“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.”
A3 (297 × 420 mm) matte print on heavyweight uncoated paper. Ships rolled, ready to frame.
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About this work
Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's 1946 account of surviving the Nazi concentration camps, joined to the psychology he built from that experience. Its claim is stark and hopeful at once: even when everything can be taken from a person, the freedom to choose one's attitude remains. From that freedom Frankl draws his central idea, that meaning, not pleasure or power, is what sustains a human life.
About the author — Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl (1905 to 1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy, a school of psychology centered on the search for meaning. He spent the rest of his life arguing that a sense of purpose is the deepest human motivation.
11 quotes from this work
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.
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.
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
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.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails gives him ample opportunity to add a deeper meaning to his life.
Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
People also ask
What is the main point of Man's Search for Meaning?
That life keeps its meaning even in suffering, and that finding a purpose is what lets people endure. Frankl argues the search for meaning is the primary drive in human life.
What is the most famous quote from Man's Search for Meaning?
The line most often cited is that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Is Man's Search for Meaning worth reading?
Yes. It is brief, profound, and widely regarded as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, equally a memoir and a practical philosophy of resilience.