This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Thus all things are doomed to change for the worse and retrograde.
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet"-and the light shineth in the darkness.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
Behavior | Decision | Dignity | Freedom | Life | Life | Man | Martyrs | Mind | Suffering | Witness | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
The third aspect of the tragic triad concerns death. But it concerns life as well, for at any time each of the moments of which life consists is dying, and that moment will never recur. And yet is not this transitoriness a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives?
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys. Take as an example something that happened on our journey from Auschwitz to the camp affiliated with Dachau… When we arrived the first important news that we heard from older prisoners was that this comparatively small camp… had no 'oven,' no crematorium, no gas!... This joyful surprise put us all in a good mood... We laughed and cracked jokes in spite of, and during, all we had to go through in the next few hours.
Change | Discovery | Indispensable | Meaning | Suffering | Discovery |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: 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!
Behavior | Freedom | Martyrs | Mind | Suffering | Witness | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of human is through love and in love.
Chance | Dignity | Fate | Man | Meaning | Self-preservation | Suffering | Fate |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
Achievement | Change | Guilt | Opportunity | Optimism | Reason | Suffering | Tragedy |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.
Death | Enjoyment | Existence | Fate | Fulfillment | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Opportunity | Purpose | Purpose | Suffering | Fate |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, How beautiful the world could be.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
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. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the why for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any how.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For 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: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
Chance | Example | Liberty | Man | Men | People | Strength | Suffering | Think |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of; likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes... 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.