The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism

To be sure, in everyday life man is inclined to misunderstand the meaning of death. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning and frightens us from our dreams, we experience this awakening as if something terrible were breaking into the world of our dreams. And, still caught in our dreams, we often do not (at least not immediately) realize that

in death man becomes the movie himself. He now “is” his life, he has become the history of his life—as good or as bad as it might have been. He has become his own heaven or his own hell.

The borderline of eternity is the place where at every moment of our lives the decision is made as to what should be eternalized and what should not.

if everything is stored in the past forever, it is important to decide in the present what we wish to eternalize by making it part of the past.

A thought may last perhaps seven seconds, and if it is a good thought it will contain truth. But even the great thought still is as transitory as the child and the great love. They are transitory altogether. Everything is transitory. Yet, on the other hand, everything is eternal. More than that: it becomes eternal of itself. We don’t have to do any

Man’s life lasts threescore years and ten, possibly fourscore years, and if it is a good life it will have been worth the trouble.

everything is transitory—everything and everybody, be it, say, a child we have produced, or the great love from which the child has sprung, or a great thought—they are transitory altogether.

how few people may be proud of their lives…

What matters in life is to achieve something.