Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. 

3/5 rating.

Book #120 of 2019. Read October 15, 2019. 

This book has some amazing insights into the human mind and our condition as a whole. Frankl lived through the Holocaust in multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He discusses the importance of each person’s “why” in their lives and how this usually made the difference between those that managed to survive the camps, and those who did not. 

The book has a plethora of wonderful quotes, but one of my favorites shows just a bit of Frankl’s genius: “The more one forgets 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.”

More Quotes:

“The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: (The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”

“One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.”

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that.”

“Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”

“Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.”

“Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.”

“Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”

“If I do not do it – who else will do it? And if I do not do it now – then when?”

“Paul Valery once said…as long as we still judge and accuse, the heart of the matter is not reached. And so we should not only remember the dead, but also forgive the living. Just as we reach out our hand to the dead, across all graves, so we reach out to the living – across all hatred.”

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