Top 94 Quotes & Sayings by Alfred Adler
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.
There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.
To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.
Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.
The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.
My difficulties belong to me!
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
The test of one's behavior pattern is their relationship to society, relationship to work and relationship to sex.
No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.
It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.
In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient's condition. Usually this is a member of the family.
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.
Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
God who is eternally complete, who directs the stars, who is the master of fates, who elevates man from his lowliness to Himself, who speaks from the cosmos to every single human soul, is the most brilliant manifestation of the goal of perfection.
It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.
It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.
Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.
A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view.
Death is really a great blessing for humanity, without it there could be no real progress. People who lived for ever would not only hamper and discourage the young, but they would themselves lack sufficient stimulus to be creative.
There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.
We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.
War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.
Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.
Man knows much more than he understands.
Follow your heart always, and remember to take your head along with you.
To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.
Everything can always be different!
Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself.
An educator's most important task, one might say his holy duty, is to see to it that no child is discouraged at school, and that a child who enters school already discouraged regains his self-confidence through his school and his teacher. This goes hand in hand with the vocation of the educator, for education is possible only with children who look hopefully and joyfully upon the future.
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.
Play is a child's work and this is not a trivial pursuit.
It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is fro+m among such individuals that all human failures spring.
Courage is not an ability one either possess or lacks. Courage is the willingness to engage in a risk-taking behavior regardless of whether the consequences are unknown or possibly adverse. We are capable of courageous behavior provided we are willing to engage in it. Given that life offers few guarantees, all living requires risk-taking.
What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning - and some of them many times over - what do you find? That you can swim? Well - life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!
Life is just the same as learning to swim. Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!
Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.
It is well known that those who do not trust themselves never trust others.
What is courage? Courage is the willingness to risk failure...There is only one danger I find in life, and that, indeed, is a real one. You may take too many precautions.
All failures - neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes - are failures because they are lacking in social interest
There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.
The goal of the human soul is conquest, perfection, security, superiority.
The only worthwhile achievements of man are those which are socially useful.
Follow your heart but take your brain with you.
You can be healed of depression if every day you begin the first thing in the morning to consider how you will bring a real joy to someone else.
It is very obvious that we are not influenced by "facts"
but by our interpretation of the facts.
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.
seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.
We are not determined by our experiences, but are self-determined by the meaning we give to them; and when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life, we are almost certain to be misguided to some degree. Meanings are not determined by situations. We determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations.
Every pampered child becomes a hated child.... There is no greater evil than the pampering of children.
The striving for significance, this sense of yearning, always points out to us that all psychological phenomena contain a movement that starts from a feeling of inferiority and reach upward. The theory of Individual Psychology of psychological compensation states that the stronger the feeling of inferiority, the higher the goal for personal power.
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