We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.” “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.” What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology 'homeostasis', i.e., a tensionless state. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfil. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. “mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. “Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.” By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.” “Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. “When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” 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.” “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.” There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: 'He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. “To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. In a word, each man is questioned by life and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” And yet, bottled as she was, and in spite of that second gramme of soma (5.1.“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.” Bottled, they crossed the street bottled, they took the lift up to Henry's room on the twenty-eighth floor.

Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. And when, exhausted, the Sixteen had laid by their saxophones and the Synthetic Music apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues, they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was! 'Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted…' But Lenina and Henry had what they wanted… They were inside, here and now-safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky. Five-stepping with the other four hundred round and round Westminster Abbey, Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another world -the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday.

Personal freedom quotes