“
Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes. But they are of the same essence: the are the mind’s indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. Where there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. […]
”
[from City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin (1967)]
I see my own thoughts, my own feelings in these words written by this wonderful writer, Ursula Le Guin, almost half a century ago. And it was, essentially, one of the key thoughts of Viktor Frankl, as well, a Holocaust survivor and great neurologist, psychologist, and philosopher: the people who survived horrors and atrocities such as concentration camps were not necessarily the strongest or fittest; they were often the people who had hope, who had something to look forward to, something to keep them going.
The Little Prince and the Fox 