This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.
Death | Enjoyment | Existence | Fate | Fulfillment | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Opportunity | Purpose | Purpose | Suffering | Fate |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. "Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death."
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, I am here--I am here--I am life, eternal life.'
Desolation | Existence | Imagination | Important | Life | Life | Memory | Mind | Past | Poverty | Spirit | World |
Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.
Discussion | Existence | Talking |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
When we are no longer able to change a situation -- we are challenged to change ourselves.
Existence | Impossibility | Man | Responsibility | Will |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
Existence | Experience | Man | Power |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Man is originally characterized by his search for meaning rather than his search for himself. The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.
Change | Existence | Freedom | Future | Individual | Man | Will |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.
Accomplishment | Challenge | Chance | Circumstances | Failure | Greatness | Life | Life | Majority | Men | Opportunity | People | Words | Failure | Think |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
Society cannot progress unless each citizen make his contribution and performs his duties.
It's not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then put it into practice, but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it — create it, as it were, from the material of the world, articulate it in the language of the world.
Existence | Insight | Responsibility |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
When Hume and Adam Smith prophesied that a little increase of national debt beyond the then amount of it, would probably occasion bankruptcy; the main cause of their error was the natural one, of not being able to see the vast increase of productive power to which the nation would subsequently obtain.