Man’s Search for Meaning
By: Viktor Frankl
Category: Philosophy
Finished:
Highlights
“He who has a Why to live can bear almost any How.” (Nietzsche)
Life is primarily a quest for meaning, and that meaning can come about in one of three ways:
- Work, by doing something significant
- Love, by caring for another person(s)
- Courage during difficult times
Suffering alone is meaningless, we choose to give meaning to our suffering. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
What humans need and want isn’t a complete release of tension and responsibility, but the pursuit of a worthwhile goal that they chose freely.
Most men give in to doing what other people are doing, or what others tell them to do.
“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 a man tries to demonstrate his sexual potency or a woman her ability to experience orgasm, the less they are able to succeed. Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.” Direct pursuit of a bodily or emotional goal can bring about its opposite.
“As we see, 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.”