Sublime

Holocaust survivor and celebrated psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

Viktor Frankl, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

When life has meaning, you can bear almost anything; without it, nothing is bearable.

It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future—sub specie aeternitatis.

Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, a meaning which even included all of her sufferings.

Viktor Frankl, the psychotherapist who spent years in Auschwitz, understood how the suffering of the Holocaust might be seen as overshadowing any other. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that we can never compare the depths of suffering “because suffering is like a gas; it completely fills whatever chamber it is in.”