Man's search for meaning

• 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 personal dedication to cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
• "Man is defined as a being who can get used to anything" - Dostoevsky
• "There are things that must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose" - lessens
• Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death
• No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same
• "There is only one thing that I dread - not to be worthy of my sufferings" - Dostoevsky
• "Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already" - Bismarck
• "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how" - Nietzsche
• ...It does not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us...
• 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
• 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!
• Every thing is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find

Logotherapy gems

• Everything can be taken from a man, but the last of the human freedoms; the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way
• By virtue of this capacity man is capable of detaching himself not only from a situation, but also from himself. He is capable of choosing his attitude toward himself
• Human freedom is finite freedom. Man is not free from conditions. But he is free to take a stand in regard to them. The conditions do not completely condition him
• Only to the extent to which man fulfills a meaning out there in the world, does he fulfill himself
• If you take human beings as they are, you make them worse. If you take them as they can be, you help them to become what they are capable of becoming
• 'We needed to stop asking ourselves about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. . . . Therefore, it was necessary for us to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer' - Quoted from Frankl's book

Of Economics and Success...

There is the will to conquer, the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others, to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but for success itself. Finally there is the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply exercising one's energy and ingenuity. - Joseph Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development (1911)