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 … - Viktor Frankl

The salvation of man is through love and in love

The truth-that love is the highest goal to which man can aspire.

The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. 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.

"Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. And today you need no longer hesitate to use the word "saints": think of Father Maximilian Kolbe who was starved and finally murdered by an injection of carbolic acid at Auschwitz and who in 1983 was canonized.

You may be prone to blame for invoking examples that are the exceptions ot the rule. "Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt" (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza. You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to "saints." Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority . More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So let us be alert-alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."

"يكشف الفراغ الوجودي عن نفسه أساساً في حالة الملل. على سبيل المثال، ما يعرف ب"عصاب يوم الراحة" (Sunday neurosis)، وهو نوع من الإكتئاب يصيب الأشخاص الذين يصيرون واعين بما ينقص حياتهم من مضمون حينما ينتهي إندفاع الأسبوع المزدحم بالمشاغل و يصبح الفراغ بداخل نفوسهم جلياً"

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.