A Quote by Viktor E. Frankl
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.
Intellectuals resist faith longer because they can: where ordinary people are helpless before the light, intellectuals are clever enough to spin webs of darkness around their minds and hide in them. That's why only Ph.D.s believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas in the world such as Absolute Relativism, or the Objective Truth of Subjectivism, of the Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness and the Meaninglessness of Meaning, which is the best definition of Deconstructionism I know.
I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.
This account of him [Thomas More] developed as I wrote: what first attracted me was a person who could not be accused of any incapacity for life, who indeed seized life in great variety and almost greedy quantities, who nevertheless found something in himself without which life was valueless and when that was denied him was able to grasp his death.
Greatness is best measured by how well an individual responds to the happenings in life that appear totally unfair, unreasonable, and undeserved. Sometimes we are inclined to put up with a situation rather than endure. To endure is to bear up under, to stand firm against, to suffer without yielding, to continue to be, or to exhibit the state or power of lasting.
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.
Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice-and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice; he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues-by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.
Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy . . . Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals,
seeks nothing but rational values, and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.
To be a disciple means forsaking everything to follow Jesus, unconditionally, putting our lives completely in His hands. When we say that we want to be His disciple, yet attach a list of conditions, Jesus refuses to accept our terms. His terms involve unconditional surrender.
Related Authors
Abraham Maslow Quotes
American
Psychologist
Carl Jung Quotes
Swiss
Psychologist
Daniel Kahneman Quotes
Israeli
Psychologist
Edward de Bono Quotes
English
Psychologist
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Quotes
American
Psychologist
Erich Fromm Quotes
American
Psychologist
James Hillman Quotes
American
Psychologist
M. Scott Peck Quotes
American
Psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes
Hungarian
Psychologist
Nathaniel Branden Quotes
American
Psychologist
Ram Dass Quotes
American
Psychologist
Rollo May Quotes
American
Psychologist
Sigmund Freud Quotes
Austrian
Psychologist
Tara Brach Quotes
American
Psychologist
Wayne Dyer Quotes
American
Psychologist