Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .

Do we fear suffering or apathy most? Is it from experience or the monotony of a commonplace existence that we quickest flee?

Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

I have a sort of empty feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing.

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

How could someone with a life this full feel this empty?

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without passion, without business, without entertainment, without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty, insufficient, dependent, ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom, gloom, sorrow, chagrin, resentment and despair.

There's nothing at the center of what we do...No center. It doesn't exist. All of us-look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else.

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.

..finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning.

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.