A book which urges to script our life based on meaningfulness steering clear of what the majority may feel right. The thoughts the author shares touch us with their sincerity as they carry the weight of experience from holocaust and not the typical steps to success. Came across this during a TV interview of Mr. RN Pravin Kumar of Telangana civil services.
for the record:
- Nietzsche, “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How”.
- Life is primarily – quest for pleasure: Freud, quest for power: Alfred Adler, quest for meaning: Frankl (Logotherapy).
- Source of Meaning – work, love and courage.
- Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
- The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed.
- Life is meaningful and we must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances.
- Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
- Life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.
- Success, like happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success. Listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
- Dostoevski – defines man as a being who can get used to anything.
- It is not the physical pain that hurts the most; it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.
- Humor is one of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self –preservation.
- A man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the size of human suffering is absolutely relative.
- No man should judge unless he asks himself in the absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
- There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
- Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
- A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
- A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts.
- They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life to such people became meaningless.
- Real opportunities of life never cease to exist.
- It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
- Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
- State of mind of a man is the state of immunity of his body.
- We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must be consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
- When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.
- The immediate influence of behaviour is always more effective than that of words.
- Neitzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
- What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.
- Human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning.
- Someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him.
- There are two races of men in this world, but only these two – the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man.
- I called to the Lord from the narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.
- No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
- Moral deformity resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure.
- Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.
- Logotherapy: Man’s main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts.
- Schopenhauer, “mankind is apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom".
- Responsibleness is the very essence of human existence.
- 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.
- A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is.
- Life has a meaning up to the last moment and it retains this meaning literally to the end.
- A life whose meaning depends on happenstance, ultimately would not be worth living.
- God preserves all your tears – Psalms 56,8.
- In the past nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.
- At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.
- Instead of possibilities I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.
- 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.
- The cue to cure is self-transcendence!
- Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.
- Man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made out of himself.
- Man has swine and saint potentialities within himself – which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
- Tragic optimism – to remain optimistic despite – pain (turning suffering into a human achievement), guilt (opportunity to change oneself for the better), death (deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action).
- Human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy.
- Meaning orientation had subsided and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over. People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.
- Man does not live by welfare alone
- Aggression can be subsided through collective purpose.
- Similar to a movie, Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief?
- Priority stays with creatively changing the situation that causes us to suffer. But the superiority goes to the “know-how to suffer,” if need be.
- No reason to pity old people – instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past.
- Difference between Being valuable in the sense of dignity and Being valuable in the sense of usefulness.
- One may howl with the wolves, if need be, but when doing so, one should be, I would urge, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
- Challenge to join the minority – of “saints”.
- Few phrases: A brand plucked from the fire; hint from heaven; struck out whole former life; textbooks tell lies; love is as strong as death; death in Tehran; here were great destinies and great men; morally and mentally hardened men; existential frustration/ vacuum; hyper-intention; hyper-reflection; paradoxical intention; hierarchy of values.
