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Living with Meaning: “Yes to Life” by Viktor Frankl (Book Summary)

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This is a book summary of Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything by Viktor Frankl (Amazon).

Yes to Life Viktor Frankl Book Cover

Yes to Life is a great addition after reading Man’s Search for Meaning. If you only have time for one of them, go for Man’s Search for Meaning:

If you’re a Premium Member, don’t miss this one: 🔒 How to Find Meaning in Life with “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl (+ 2 Infographics)

Quick Housekeeping:

  • All quotes are from the author unless otherwise stated.
  • I’ve added emphasis in bold to the original quotes.
  • I’ve organized quotes into my own themes.

Book Summary Contents:

Sloww Yes to Life Viktor Frankl Book Summary

Living with Meaning: “Yes to Life” by Viktor Frankl (Book Summary)

About the Book (Intro by Daniel Goleman):

The book is split into three parts. Viktor Frankl says: “And ultimately that was the entire purpose of these three parts: to show you that people can still—despite hardship and death (first part), despite suffering from physical or mental illness (second part) or under the fate of the concentration camp (third part)—say yes to life in spite of everything.”

  • “It’s a minor miracle this book exists. The lectures that form the basis of it were given in 1946 by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl a scant eleven months after he was liberated from a labor camp where, a short time before, he had been on the brink of death.” — Daniel Goleman
  • “Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything has never before been published in English.” — Daniel Goleman
  • “The phrase ‘yes to life,’ Viktor Frankl recounts, was from the lyrics of a song sometimes sung sotto voce (so as not to anger guards) by inmates of some of the four camps in which he was a prisoner.” — Daniel Goleman
  • “Some of the lyrics expressed hope, particularly this: Whatever our future may hold: We still want to say ‘yes’ to life, Because one day the time will come—Then we will be free!” — Daniel Goleman
  • “If the prisoners of Buchenwald, tortured and worked and starved nearly to death, could find some hope in those lyrics despite their unending suffering, Frankl asks us, shouldn’t we, living far more comfortably, be able to say ‘Yes’ to life in spite of everything life brings us?” — Daniel Goleman

Propaganda & The Spirit of the Time

“The propaganda of these last years was a propaganda against all possible meaning and against the questionable value of existence itself! In fact, these years have sought to demonstrate the worthlessness of human life.”

  • “A human being should never become a means to an end. But already in the economic system of the last few decades, most working people had been turned into mere means, degraded to become mere tools for economic life. It was no longer work that was the means to an end, a means for life or indeed a food for life—rather it was a man and his life, his vital energy, his ‘man power,’ that became this means to an end.”
  • “Today, our attitude to life hardly has any room for belief in meaning. We are living in a typical postwar period. Although I am using a somewhat journalistic phrase here, the state of mind and the spiritual condition of an average person today is most accurately described as ‘spiritually bombed out.’“
  • “We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this. We first have to overcome it.”
  • “If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something ‘progresses.’ In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.”
  • “Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!”

The Individual Human

“What has come through to us from the past? Two things: everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being. Therefore, we must counter the negative propaganda of recent times, the propaganda of ‘Non-Sense,’ of ‘Non-Meaning,’ with another propaganda that must be, firstly, individual and, secondly, active. Only then can it be positive.”

  • “The past few years have certainly disenchanted us, but they have also shown us that what is human is still valid; they have taught us that it is all a question of the individual human being. After all, in the end, what was left was the human being! Because it was the human being that survived amid all the filth of the recent past. And equally it was the human being that was left in the experiences of the concentration camps.”
  • “There was an example of this somewhere in Bavaria in which the camp commander, an SS man, secretly spent money from his own pocket to regularly buy medicines for ‘his’ prisoners from the pharmacy in the nearby Bavarian market town; while in the same camp, the senior camp warden, so himself a prisoner, mistreated the camp inmates in the most appalling way: it all came down to the individual human being!“
  • “What remained was the individual person, the human being—and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down—the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one—the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that ‘he’ had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self. So, in the end, was there something like a decision that needed to be made? It does not surprise us, because ‘existence’—to the nakedness and rawness of which the human being was returned—is nothing other than a decision.“
  • “And now to the question of the meaning of our imperfections and of our particular imbalances: Let us not forget that each individual person is imperfect, but each is imperfect in a different way, each ‘in his own way.’ And as imperfect as he is, he is uniquely imperfect. So, expressed in a positive way, he becomes somehow irreplaceable, unable to be represented by anyone else, unexchangeable.“
  • “However, help was at hand for the human being in making this decision; the critical factor was the existence of others, the being of others, specifically their being role models. This was more fruitful than all that talk and all that writing. Because the fact of being is always more pivotal than the word. And it was necessary, and will always remain so, to ask oneself whether this fact is not far more important than writing books or giving lectures: that each of us actualizes the content in our own act of being. That which is actualized is also much more effective. Words alone are not enough.”

The Individual’s Connection to the Collective

“Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake but individuality for the human community.”

  • “As discussed earlier, just as death proved to be necessary for finding meaning in that it justified the uniqueness of our existence and with it our responsibleness, we can now see that the imperfect nature of human beings is meaningful since—now regarded positively—it represents the individuality of our essential inner being. However, this uniqueness as a positive value cannot be based on itself alone. Analogous to the functional value of the single cell for the whole organism, the unique individuality of each human being is given value through its relationship with an overarching whole; namely, a human community.“
  • “If we were to try to summarize in a formula the unique nature of existence and the uniqueness of every human being, and this uniqueness as a uniqueness ‘for’—in other words a uniqueness that is focused on others, on the community—a formula that can remind us of the terrible and glorious responsibility of human beings for the seriousness of their lives, then we could rely on a dictum that Hillel, a founder of the Talmud, made into his motto almost two thousand years ago. This motto is: ‘If I do not do it, who else will do it? But if I only do it for me, what am I then? And if I do not do it now, then when will I do it?’ ‘If not I’—therein lies the uniqueness of every single person; ‘If only for me,’ therein lies the worthlessness and meaninglessness of such uniqueness unless it is a ‘serving’ uniqueness; ‘and if not now,’ therein lies the uniqueness of every individual situation!“
  • “The uniqueness and individuality of every human being constitutes the value of his person, and that this value must be related to a community to which this uniqueness is of value, then we were all thinking of it primarily in terms of serving the community; but now we can see that there is also a second way in which the person as a unique and individual being always comes into his own, in which the value of his personality is also realized and his personal, specific meaning of life is fulfilled: this is the way of love, or better still, of being loved. This is more or less a passive path, without any striving, without any doing—’without doing anything for it’—in being loved, what someone otherwise had to strive for in his activity or employment now seems to fall into his lap; on this path of being loved he achieves the things he would normally have to fight for and win through his performance, but without needing to earn them: indeed one cannot earn love; love is not a reward, but a blessing. On the path of love a person thus receives by ‘grace’ the things he would otherwise have to strive for or obtain through action: the realization of both his uniqueness and his individuality. For it is the nature of love that makes us see our loved one in their uniqueness and individuality.“

Fate & Misfortune

“Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary. In either case we can experience nothing but inner growth through such misfortune.”

  • “We are not able to direct fate—we describe fate as whatever we have no influence over, whatever escapes the power of our will.”
  • “How misguided it now seems to us when people simply complain about their misfortune or rail against their fate. What would have become of each of us without our fate? How else would our existence have taken shape and form than under its hammer blows and in the white heat of our suffering at its hands?”
  • “Those who rebel against their fate—that is, against circumstances they cannot help and which they certainly cannot change—have not grasped the meaning of fate. Fate really is integral in the totality of our lives; and not even the smallest part of what is destined can be broken away from this totality without destroying the whole, the configuration of our existence.”
  • “Fate is part of our lives and so is suffering; therefore, if life has meaning, suffering also has meaning. Consequently, suffering, as long as it is necessary and unavoidable, also holds the possibility of being meaningful.”
  • “True suffering of an authentic fate is an achievement, and, indeed, is the highest possible achievement.”
  • “How deeply in the consciousness of humankind must lie the knowledge that suffering belongs to life itself!”

Suffering & Meaning Cannot be Compared

“In spite of everything, no human suffering can be compared to anyone else’s.”

  • “It is part of the nature of suffering that it is the suffering of a particular person, that it is his or her own suffering—that its ‘magnitude’ is dependent solely on the sufferer, that is, on the person; a person’s solitary suffering is just as unique and individual as is every person.”
  • “This man had forgotten that it is never a question of where someone is in life or which profession he is in, it is only a matter of how he fills his place, his circle. Whether a life is fulfilled doesn’t depend on how great one’s range of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is filled out. In his specific life circle, every single human being is irreplaceable and inimitable, and that is true for everyone. The tasks that his life imposes are only for him, and only he is required to fulfill them. And a person who has not completely filled his (relatively) larger circle remains more unfulfilled than that of a person whose more closely drawn circle is sufficient.“

The Truth about Happiness

“Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome.”

  • “Life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be ‘willed into being’ as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise.”
  • “It was Kierkegaard who told the wise parable that the door to happiness always opens ‘outward,’ which means it closes itself precisely against the person who tries to push the door to happiness ‘inward,’ so to speak.”
  • “All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.”
  • “Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.”

Life asks us the Questions

“The question can no longer be ‘What can I expect from life?’ but can now only be ‘What does life expect of me?’ What task in life is waiting for me?”

  • “Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life—it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us—we are the ones who are questioned! We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential ‘life questions.'”
  • “None of us knows what is waiting for us, what big moment, what unique opportunity for acting in an exceptional way.”
  • “We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now.”
  • “The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.”
  • “The meaning of life can only be a specific one, specific both in relation to each individual person and in relation to each individual hour: the question that life asks us changes both from person to person, and from situation to situation.”
  • “In the course of life, human beings must be prepared to change the direction of this fulfillment of meaning, often abruptly, according to the particular ‘challenges of the hour.’“
  • “The ‘metaphysics of everyday life’ only at first leads us out of everyday life, but then—consciously and responsibly—it leads us back into everyday life.”

Our Responsibility is Answering Life

“If we now summarize what we said about the ‘meaning’ of life, we can conclude: life itself means being questioned, means answering; each person must be responsible for their own existence. Life no longer appears to us as a given, but as something given over to us, it is a task in every moment. This therefore means that it can only become more meaningful the more difficult it becomes.”

  • “Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to—of being responsible toward—life.”
  • “Life itself means being questioned and that we cannot justifiably ask about its meaning, since this meaning exists in the act of answering. But we said that the answers that we must give to life’s specific questions can no longer exist in words but only in deeds, and more than that in living, in our whole being! The questions of ‘our lives’ can, as we felt, only be answered by each of us being responsible for ‘our own lives.’“
  • “One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment—so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful ‘to the very last breath’; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions. This should not surprise us once we recall the great fundamental truth of being human—being human is nothing other than being conscious and being responsible!“
  • “What leads us forward and helps us along the way, what has guided and is guiding us, is a joy in taking responsibility.”
  • “Responsibility is something one is both ‘drawn to’ and ‘withdraws from.’“
  • “It is terrible to know that at every moment I bear responsibility for the next; that every decision, from the smallest to the largest, is a decision ‘for all eternity’; that in every moment I can actualize the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities—and I can only choose one of them to actualize it. But in making the choice, I have condemned all the others and sentenced them to ‘never being,’ and even this is for all eternity! But it is wonderful to know that the future—my own future and with it the future of the things, the people around me—is somehow, albeit to a very small extent, dependent on my decisions in every moment. Everything I realize through them, or ‘bring into the world,’ as we have said, I save into reality and thus protect from transience.“
  • “Certainly, the burden is heavy, it is difficult not only to recognize responsibility but also to commit to it. To say yes to it, and to life. But there have been people who have said yes despite all difficulties.”
  • “To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances—because life itself is—but it is also possible under all circumstances.”

3 Directions of Meaningful Living

For an example of living all 3 forms of meaning, see this companion post: A Real-Life Meaningful Example of Saying “Yes to Life” (Short Story)

1. Through our Actions (Doing)

  • “First of all, our answer can be an active answer, giving an answer through action, answering specific life questions with a deed that we complete or a work that we create.”
  • “through our actions … insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly”
  • “by doing something, by acting, by creating—by bringing a work into being”
  • “as active agents“

2. Through our Experience (Being)

  • “Those who experience, not the arts, but nature, may have a similar response, and also those who experience another human being.”
  • “Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful.”
  • “by experiencing something—nature, art—or loving people”
  • “as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good“

3. Through our Attitude (Thinking)

  • “Human beings are able to find meaning even where finding value in life is not possible for them in either the first or the second way—namely, precisely when they take a stance toward the unalterable, fated, inevitable, and unavoidable limitation of their possibilities: how they adapt to this limitation, react toward it, how they accept this fate.”
  • “How we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are, and that, too, can enable us to live meaningfully.”
  • “We give life meaning not only through our actions but also through loving and, finally, through suffering.”
  • “Because how human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions—the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions—in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.”
  • “Not only life itself but also the suffering involved has a meaning, and in fact a meaning that is so unconditional that it can be fulfilled even where the suffering does not lead to outward success, where it looks as though the suffering was in vain.”
  • “Even suffering contributes to meaning and is part of the meaning of life.”

The Role of Death

“The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.”

  • “Even dying can have meaning, that it can be meaningful ‘to die one’s own death.’“
  • “If we look at things that way then, essentially, it may prove to be quite irrelevant to us how long a human life lasts. Its long duration does not automatically make it meaningful, and its possible briefness makes it far from meaningless. We also do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.”
  • “From this we can see just one thing: death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it—or leave unfulfilled—that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited ‘for all eternity.’ Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently ‘canceled out’ by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The ‘being,’ the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.”
  • “Certainly, our life, in terms of the biological, the physical, is transitory in nature. Nothing of it survives—and yet how much remains! What remains of it, what will remain of us, what can outlast us, is what we have achieved during our existence that continues to have an effect, transcending us and extending beyond us. The effectiveness of our life becomes incorporeal and in that way it resembles radium, whose physical form is also, during the course of its ‘lifetime’ (and radioactive materials are known to have a limited lifetime) increasingly converted into radiation energy, never to return to materiality. What we ‘radiate’ into the world, the ‘waves’ that emanate from our being, that is what will remain of us when our being itself has long since passed away.“

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