Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Meaning of the quote
When something happens to us, we immediately have a reaction. However, there is a moment in between when we experience something and when we respond to it. This moment is like a space where we can decide how to react. The way we choose to respond to a situation determines how we grow as a person and how free we are to make our own decisions.
More quotes from Viktor E. Frankl
When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.
Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
What is to give light must endure burning.
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.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.
I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
A human being is a deciding being.
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
The last of human freedoms – the ability to chose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.