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 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. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.

. . . nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. "Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death."

Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy.

Everywhere man is confronted with fate , with a chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

As such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.

When a man cannot find meaning, he numbs himself with pleasure.