Frankl wrote it for the Preface to the 1992 Edition of Man’s Search for Meaning — front matter added decades after the 1946 camp memoir the book is famous for — quoting the standing advice he gave his students in Europe and America. In his own text the two halves are joined by a dash, and the passage keeps going: success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it” Viktor E. Frankl, "Preface to the 1992 Edition," Man's Search for Meaning, 4th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 12–13. Frankl's wording: "Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…"
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Provenance
The actual source
Work
Man's Search for Meaning
Section
“Preface to the 1992 Edition,” pp. 12–13 — signed “Vienna, 1992”
None for this passage. The title page credits Part One to translator Ilse Lasch; the 1992 preface carries no translator credit.
Again and again I therefore admonish my students both in Europe and in America: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue …”
Preface to the 1992 Edition, pp. 12–13
Frankl is quoting himself: the sentence sits inside quotation marks because he is reporting the advice he repeatedly gave his students. The passage continues past this point, through “Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success” to a closing promise that success follows you precisely because you forgot to think of it.
The line is in the book’s front matter, not its memoir. The Beacon Press text’s own contents listing at the Internet Archive ↗ shows “Preface to the 1992 edition” standing as its own section, ahead of “Experiences in a concentration camp.”
Wikiquote ↗ carries the whole passage — the “aim at success” sentence plus the “cannot be pursued; it must ensue” continuation — among the sourced quotes for the book, not in any disputed or misattributed list.
The Marginalian ↗ reproduces the same passage and places it in the introduction Frankl wrote for the 1992 edition, where he reflects on the book having become a bestseller.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What goes wrong with it
No one else has ever claimed this line — it really is Frankl’s. What travels wrongly is where it comes from, how it is punctuated, and who he was talking to.
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The sourcethe 1946 concentration-camp memoir Mis-sourced
Quote pages credit it simply to Man’s Search for Meaning — Goodreads gives the attribution as just “Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning” ↗ — which reads as though it were a line from the camp narrative Frankl wrote in 1945. It is not in that narrative. It sits in the preface he added for the 1992 edition, explaining why the book he had wanted published anonymously became a bestseller.
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The wordingthe clipped two-sentence internet version Repunctuated
Frankl joined the two halves with a dash and did not stop there. Wikiquote’s sourced text ↗ keeps the original shape — “Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it” — and carries on into the clause that does the actual work: success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue. The popular form ends at the full stop and drops the argument.
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The framingFrankl as aphorist Context lost
In the original the words sit inside quotation marks: Frankl is reporting the counsel he gave his students, not coining a maxim. The Marginalian ↗ preserves that setting — advice offered to his students in a preface reflecting on the book’s unexpected success.
✓The words are genuinely Frankl’s. They come from the “Preface to the 1992 Edition” of Man’s Search for Meaning — a front-matter section listed in the Beacon Press contents at the Internet Archive ↗ — where he explains why the book he meant to publish anonymously became a success.
Context
Why he wrote it
The advice is Frankl explaining his own book to himself. He wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine successive days in 1945 and meant it to be published anonymously — the first printing of the German original carried no author name on the cover — precisely so that it could never build a reputation for its author. By 1992 it had done the opposite, and the preface he added for the fourth edition is his attempt to account for the irony: the thing he had refused to aim at was the thing he hit.
It is a clinical claim as much as an aphorism. In Part Two of the same book, “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” Frankl gives the mechanism a name — hyper-intention — and describes it in patients: the harder someone forces potency or sleep, the more reliably it escapes them, because pleasure only ever arrives as a by-product and is spoiled to the degree it is made a goal in itself. The success line is that observation turned outward on a life.
Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
Two footnotes on the text
The happiness half of the thought recurs in the book’s 1984 postscript, “The Case for a Tragic Optimism,” where Frankl writes that happiness cannot be pursued but must ensue, and that one must first have a reason to be happy.
Transcriptions differ by a word in the middle of the passage: Wikiquote gives “one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself,” while the Beacon Press text reads “one’s dedication.” A reminder that even a well-sourced modern quotation drifts between printings.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1905–1997 · Viennese neurologist & psychiatrist, founder of logotherapy
Viktor Emil Frankl (1905–1997) was a Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, promoted as the third Viennese school of psychotherapy after Freud’s and Adler’s, on the claim that a search for meaning is the central human motivation. He survived the Nazi camps; his first wife, his parents and his brother did not. He wrote some three dozen books, but the one reconstructed after his liberation in 1945 — Man’s Search for Meaning — is the one that made him world-famous, which is exactly the fact this quotation was written to explain.
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Cite this
Primary source
Viktor E. Frankl, “Preface to the 1992 Edition,” in Man's Search for Meaning, 4th ed., part one trans. Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 12–13.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/dont-aim-at-success-the-more-you-aim-at-it-and-make-it-a/