(other's) Words

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946):

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by ... See more

Love is always unlikely, and statistically nearly impossible, a bizarre and anxious triumph whether we connect with someone for a night or for a lifetime.

Progress has delivered everything except the will to endure it.

Absorbed in comfort, we are restless. Drowning in excess, we are hollow. The statistics confirm what our souls already know: despair has metastasized, anxiety has become our natural state, and in the absence of real suffering, we have made a spectacle of our own discontent.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unkno... See more

We can only escape from the world

by outgrowing the world.

Death may take man out of

the world but only wisdom

can take the world out

of the man.

Man has achieved his present position by being the most aggressive and enterprising creature on earth. And now he has created a comfortable civilization, he faces an unexpected problem... The comfortable life lowers man's resistance, so that he sinks into an unheroic sloth... The comfortable life causes spiritual decay.

Anxiety, as Rollo May also pointed out, “is not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence.”