Victor E. Frankl's deeply impactful book "Man's Search for Meaning"

I am glad that I have just finished reading Victor E. Frankl's deeply impactful book "Man's Search for Meaning". The writer was a psychiatrist who had survived the terrible Concentration Camp during the Second World War. The main part of this book was written not too long after the writer's release. Every page of this book I found to be meaningful, so eloquently written the humaneness of our existence, through sheer sufferings and joyful freedom. I could not resist myself sharing some of the enlightening words of wisdom from this must read book that to me are timeless. If you read one book this year, I humbly recommend that pick up this book and read it from the beginning to end, highlighting the words and sentences written by a man with a kind and genuine heart. 

Here are some excerpts: 

"In reality there are only two races, namely the “race” of decent people and the “race” of people who are not decent."

"That decent people are in the minority, that they have always been a minority and are likely to remain so is something we must come to terms with. Danger only threatens when a political system sends those not-decent people, i.e., the negative element of a nation, to the top. And no nation is immune from doing this, and in this respect every nation is in principle capable of a Holocaust!"

"only two types of politicians: the first are those who believe that the end justifies the means, and that could be any means . . . While the other type of politician knows very well that there are means that could desecrate the holiest end. And it is this type of politician whom I trust"

"What then is man? Thus we ask the question again. He is a being that always decides what it is. A being that has within it at one and the same time the possibility of sinking to the level of an animal or of soaring to a life of near-holiness. Man is that being which invented the gas chambers; but he is at the same time that being which walked with head held high into these very same gas chambers, the Lord’s Prayer or the Jewish prayer for the dead on his lips."

"Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness."

"And in their last words there was not a single word of hatred—only words of longing came from their lips—and words of forgiveness; for what they hated, and what we hate, is never people. One must be able to forgive people. What they hated was simply the system—the system that made some guilty and drove others to their death."

"nobody has the right to wait “until things become clearer” and to continue to live only provisionally. As soon as we try to shape the provisional, it is no longer provisional! Whether it is the provisional in the big things or the small things—each of us has to reshape our own “provisional” life into a definitive one. Nobody is allowed to wait any longer—each of us must pitch in—each of us must ask ourselves, as a wise man asked sixteen centuries ago: “If I do not do it—who else will do it? And if I do not do it now—then when?”"

"And so we should not only remember the dead, but also forgive the living. Just as we reach out our hand to the dead, across all graves, so we reach out to the living—across all hatred. And when we say: Honored be the dead, so we should add: And peace to all the living who are of goodwill."