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

Frankl quotes this saying from Nietzsche twice near the end of Part One and again early in Part Two (in the section titled Noö-Dynamics). It expresses his conviction that having meaning—purpose—in one’s life is a great source of strength. (However, Frankl also declares, early in Part One, that he cannot say where he and his fellow inmates got the strength to grow used to camp conditions.) In Nietzsche’s writings, the quote is found in Twilight of the Idols (1889).

The salvation of man is through love and in love.

Frankl came to this insight while experiencing a quasi-mystical vision of his wife, appearing to him as a comforting presence. Elsewhere, Frankl identifies three ways to acquire meaning in life: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. Love is what Frankl means by “encountering someone.” He does not attempt to harmonize the thesis that salvation is through love with his insistence that meaning can be found in a wide variety of things or activities.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.

This quote, from the middle of Part One, summarizes Frankl’s view that suffering can be a source of meaning when all other possibilities are closed off by circumstance. The phrase “takes up his cross” comes from Jesus, speaking to his followers (Mt. 16:24). Frankl, though Jewish, readily draws on the Christian tradition to make his point. A page earlier, Frankl approvingly quotes Dostoevsky: “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.

This quote appears mid-way through Part Two, at the start of the section titled Life’s Transitoriness. In this section and again in the postscript, Frankl writes eloquently of “the full granaries of the past,” where everything a person has done and experienced is safely, unalterably stored up. Frankl means to change our perspective on the past and the future: instead of thinking of the future as still alive and the past as dead and gone, we should instead think of the past as more real than the future. After all, the future is a bundle of unrealized possibilities, whereas everything in the past has become permanently actual.

After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

These concluding words of Part Two strikingly underscore what Frankl has said in various ways throughout the book, that in every human being there is a capacity both for great evil and for great good. Earlier, he makes the same point by alluding to “the rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings.” In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn echoes the thought: “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” The Lord’s Prayer Frankl refers to is the prayer Jesus is recorded in the Christian gospels as teaching his disciples. Christians sometimes recite this prayer in times of trouble. Shema Yisrael (“Hear, O Israel”) are the opening words of the prayer recited by observant Jews as often as twice a day, an exhortation to remember that God is one and to obey His commandments (Deut. 6:4 and following).

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