Completed on April 1, 2022. Frankl continually draws strength from uniquely human abilities such as innate optimism, humor, psychological examination, brief solitudes, inner freedom, and the will to never give up or kill yourself. The meaning of his life is to help others find the meaning of life. He advocates: nourish inner freedom, embrace the beauty of nature, art, poetry and literature, and feel love for family and friends.
Most of this book is about what he saw and thought when he was in the concentration camp, and brought me into this tragic concentration camp world to feel his despair and hope. The second half expounds the understanding of some concepts, the emptiness of existence, the meaning of life, the essence of existence, the meaning of love, and the meaning of difficulty. After reading it, I believe that suffering is also a part of life, and there is no suffering that cannot be overcome.
1、
The only way you can survive is to look like you can work.
2、
The shacks of the camps were littered with excrement, and the more people knew about it, the more they needed to be in constant contact with it.
3、
I finally understood one thing, and I understand it better now, and that is to love a body that can go beyond loving her. Love has deep spiritual and inner meanings, and it matters how the love ends whether or not the partner is present, alive or not.
4、
Humor is another weapon the soul uses to protect itself. Humor, more than any other element of human nature, is capable of disregarding hardship and detaching oneself from any situation, even for a few seconds.
5、
Under the weight of a person who no longer recognizes the value of human life, deprives him of his will and makes it an object of destruction, the human ego will eventually suffer from a lack of value.
6、
The active life can give people the opportunity to realize value through creative work, while the negative life can make people satisfied with the pursuit of beauty, art or nature.
7、
Psychological observation of prisoners shows that only those who surrender themselves and give up their inner grasp of moral and spiritual self will become victims of the harsh conditions of the concentration camps.
8、
As painful passion, once we have a clear and definite awareness of it, it ceases to be painful. – Spinoza, “Ethics”
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He who knows what to live for will survive. – Nietzsche
10、
Under no circumstances is human life meaningless, and the infinite meaning of life includes hardship, deprivation, and death.
11、
According to logotherapy, striving to discover the meaning of life is the primary motivation of human beings.
12、
In taking up the challenge of pain bravely, life has meaning in that moment and maintains that meaning to the end.
13、
The more a man tries to show his sexuality, or the more a woman tries to show his orgasm, the less likely he will be successful. Pleasure is an add-on, and if the add-on becomes an end in itself, it is detracted from it.
14、
Although suffering exists, it is even said that meaning can be found through suffering, provided that suffering is unavoidable. If it can be avoided, then it only makes sense to eliminate its cause, because suffering unnecessary suffering is less heroic than masochistic.
15、
Enjoy your life now, as if you were living a second time, and don't act and live the wrong way you did your first life.
16、
There is no reason to pity the elderly. Instead, young people should be jealous of old people. Although the elderly have no chance and no future possibility, they have much more wealth than that. They have accomplishments preserved in the past—those that they have fulfilled and what they have accomplished—and nothing and no one can take away from the past.
17、
We ourselves must answer the questions that life throws at us, and to answer these questions we must take responsibility for life.
18、
Suffering is not necessarily necessary to find meaning, but despite suffering, life can still have meaning.