Some choice quotations from Frankl’s worthwhile read, Man’s Search For Meaning, in which he relates his Holocaust concentration camp experiences which lead him to develop the “third Viennese school of psychology”, logotherapy. The book begins with a question he asks his patients: Why don’t you commit suicide?

1. “But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

   A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. 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 thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment in the contemplation of his beloved. “

2. “We had to learn ourselves, and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

   These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. … No man and no destiny can be compared with any otherr man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response… Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.”

3. “Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the larks’ jubilation and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky - and then I went down on my knees. At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world - I had but one sentence in mind - always the same: “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”

   How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until I again became a human being.”