To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering

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.

'He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.' - Nietzsche.

'That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.' - Nietzsche.

It is a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what one needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, 'homeostasis,' i.e., a tensionless state. What one actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What one needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

'Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.'

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.

According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but each of us is ultimately self-determining. What one becomes—within the limits of endowment and environment—one has made out of oneself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate one cannot change, one may rise above oneself, may grow beyond oneself, and by so doing change oneself.

If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.