They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.

Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely.

Once an individual's search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.

The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one's fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.

Most important, he realized that, no matter what happened, he retained the freedom to choose how to respond to his suffering.

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.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And

Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.

Regarding our "provisional existence" as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless.

I wonder," said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his looking about, "that he keeps that reminder of his sufferings about him!" "And why wonder at that?" was the abrupt inquiry that made him start. It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand, whose acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at Dover, and had since improved.

A rose's beautiful scent is extracted only when it is crushed.