QuoteProject
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Viktor E. Frankl
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Questioning life's purpose is essential to our humanity.

This quote by Viktor E. Frankl highlights the intrinsic nature of human beings to seek understanding and meaning in their lives. Engaging with profound questions about life reflects our unique capacity for introspection and existential thought, revealing the core of what it means to be human.

Themes

MeaningLifeHumanExistenceQuestioning

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about the importance of philosophy in education, one might quote Frankl to emphasize critical thinking.

More from Viktor E. Frankl

Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Viktor E. FranklRead
The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore—except his God.
Viktor E. FranklRead
Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
Viktor E. FranklRead
It is the pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
Viktor E. FranklRead
Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.
Viktor E. FranklRead
The more one forgives 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.
Viktor E. FranklRead

Similar quotes

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
Frank HerbertRead
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.
Abraham LincolnRead
However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts.
John CalvinRead
Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
Normativity, I believe, is very different from motivating force. Neither includes, or implies, the other. Other animals can be motivated by their desires and beliefs. Only we can understand and respond to reasons.
Derek ParfitRead
Early on I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included.
Thomas McguaneRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.