Existential Psychotherapy in Quotes

While preparing for seminars on existential psychotherapy and reading the literature, I have come across a great many beautiful quotes expressed in their works by existentially minded philosophers, psychotherapists, and psychologists. I share this collection of quotes:

Viktor Frankl

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

When we are no longer able to change a situation — we must change ourselves.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing — the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Life can just as well be pulled by a purpose as it can be driven by impulse.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Ever more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.

The meaning of life differs — from person to person, from day to day, from hour to hour. Therefore, what matters is not the meaning of life in general but rather the meaning of a specific person’s life at a specific moment.

Erich Fromm

Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”

A selfish person is not capable of loving others, but equally, they are not capable of loving themselves.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have, then who am I?

Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to everyone else, their love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egoism.

To die is bitter, but the thought of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

We all dream. We do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange had happened during sleep — strange, at least, compared to the logical, purposeful waking mind.

Only the person who has faith in themselves is able to be faithful to others.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativity means to be born before you die.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition that impels man to unfold his powers.

Most people in our society believe that being loveable is a combination of being popular and having sex appeal.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

Man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

Rollo May

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice — it is conformity.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you have betrayed yourself.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Rather, it is the ability to move forward in spite of fear.

The opposite of love is not hate. It is apathy.

It is impossible to become a real human being while bypassing pain.

Joy, not happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion that accompanies the fulfillment of our human nature. Joy is grounded in the experience of one’s own identity — in being valued and respected.

Care is a state in which something matters. Care is the source of tenderness.

The relationship between trust and doubt is by no means oppositional. Trust is healthiest not in the absence of doubt, but in spite of doubt.

Myth is a way of making sense of a senseless world. Myth is a narrative that gives meaning to our existence.

Friedrich Nietzsche

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

We love life not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving.

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

To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in the suffering.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

He who would learn to fly must first learn to stand, walk, run, climb, and dance. One cannot start to fly from flying.

Hope is in truth the greatest of evils, for it prolongs the suffering of man.

A wise man must not only learn to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Madness in individuals is something rare. But in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

The most common lie is the one we tell ourselves. Lying to others — that is the exception.

We have art so that we do not perish from the truth.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Heidegger

If I accept death into my life, acknowledge it and face it, I shall free myself from the fear of death and the pettiness of life — and only then will I be free to become myself.

When we say — to everything its own time, it means that everything that is, every being, arrives and departs in its own time, and remains for as long as it has been allotted. To everything its own time.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Everything has been figured out — except how to live.

Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you.

Only the man who does not row can rock the boat.

Man is condemned to be free. Once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

We do not know what we want, and yet we are responsible for what we are — that is the fact.

There is only one day left, always starting over — it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

I maintain that murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

Evil arises from people’s ability to make abstract what is concrete.

Albert Camus

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Freedom is nothing more than a chance to be better.

I know only one duty, and that is the duty to love.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.

About the people we love, we always lie to ourselves twice. First for their benefit, then to their detriment.