When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. 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.
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
In a position of utter desolation, when 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.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
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.'
Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.
A human being is a deciding being.
Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is.
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.
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
