Daily Inspiration Quote by Viktor E. Frankl

Frankl’s line doesn’t flatter you with “anything is possible.” It corners you with something harsher: when history strips you of nearly everything, what’s left is not comfort but responsibility. Written in the shadow of the camps and later distilled through logotherapy, the phrasing is doing deliberate triage. “The last” signals a grim hierarchy of losses; freedom isn’t a broad political abstraction here, it’s what remains after property, safety, dignity, even the future have been confiscated. That superlative turns attitude into a kind of moral contraband.

The key move is the word “choose.” Frankl isn’t describing a mood that happens to you; he’s reframing inner life as an act, a stance you take. It’s both empowering and accusatory. If attitude is choosable, then despair can’t be treated only as fate. Yet the sentence carefully avoids the self-help lie that you can choose your circumstances. “In a given set” is the boundary condition, the realism clause. He grants the brute facts, then demands a human response that isn’t reducible to them.

Subtextually, this is a rebuttal to deterministic psychologies that explain behavior as mere conditioning. In the camps, the “given set of circumstances” was engineered to prove people are nothing but animals under pressure. Frankl’s claim is that the oppressor’s final victory depends on your internal consent. Calling attitude a “freedom” upgrades it from coping mechanism to ethics: meaning isn’t found after suffering ends; it’s forged in how you meet it.