Quotes about Responsibility

Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy.

When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really us. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisreal on his lips.

For in every case man retains the freedom and the possibility of deciding for or against the influence of his surroundings.

I]t is a matter of indifference what a person's occupation is, or at what job he works. The crucial thing is how he works, whether he in fact fills the place in which he happens to have landed. The radius of his activity is not important; important alone is whether he fills the circle of his tasks.

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

The last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence

that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.

ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoner's inner self was not so much the enumerated psychophysical causes as it was the result of a free decision.