Victor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning

“He learns what a human being does when he suddenly realizes he has ‘nothing to lose except his so ridiculously naked life.’”

“First to the rescue comes a cold detached curiosity concerning one’s fate. Swiftly, too, come strategies to preserve the remnants of one’s life……the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is.”
Nietzsche’s saying, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

對於自身經驗的矛盾，Frankl有以下的看法：
“Does a man who makes his observations while he himself is a prisoner possess the necessary detachment? Such detachment is granted to the outsider, but he is too far removed to make any statements of real value. Only the man inside knows. His judgments may not be objective; his evaluations may be out of proportion. This is inevitable. An attempt must be made to avoid any personal bias, and that is the real difficulty of a book of this kind. At times it will be necessary to have the courage to tell of very intimate experiences. I had intended to write this book (Man’s search for Meaning) anonymously, using my prison number only. But when the manuscript was completed, I saw that as an anonymous publication it would lose half its value, and that I must have the courage to state my convictions openly. I there refrained from deleting any of the passages, in spite of an intense dislike of exhibitionism.”