Alfred Adler Quotations

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

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.

We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

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.

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.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

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.

In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown.

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 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 only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.

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.

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.

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.

To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.

We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.

Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.

A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.

It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.

The test of one's behavior pattern is their relationship to society, relationship to work and relationship to sex.

It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.

There are thousands of degrees and variations, but it is always clearly the attitude of a person who finds his superiority in solving the complications of others.

Life happens at the level of events, not words

Let yourself be guided in your pedagogic interventions especially by the observations you have made on the results of your former interventions.

Neurosis is the natural, logical development of an individual who is comparatively inactive, filled with a personal, egocentric striving for superiority, and is therefore retarded in the development of his social interest, as we find regularly among

One of the most interesting complexes is the redeemer complex. It characterizes people who conspicuously but unknowingly take the attitude that they must save or redeem someone.

If anyone asks me why he should love his neighbor, I would not know how to answer him, and I could only ask in my turn why he should pose such a question. It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties

If the truth is there, bad writing won't hurt it !

There is a Law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.

We can comprehend every single life phenomenon, as if the past, the present, and the future together with a superordinate, guiding idea were present in it in traces.

There is always this element of concealed accusation in neurosis, the patient feeling as though he were deprived of his right-that is, of the center of attention - and wanting to fix the responsibility and blame upon someone.

My passions are the grapes that I tread out for mankind.

It is easier to fight for our principles than it is to live up to them.

We live upon the contributions of our ancestors. Nature is a good scavenger. She soon gets rid of her rubbish.

The widespread belief that Yuppies as a class would perish from Brie-cheese poisoning turned out to be over-optimistic.

Every pampered child becomes a hated child.... There is no greater evil than the pampering of children.

Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.

It is one of the triumphs of human wit ... to conquer by humility and submissiveness ... to make oneself small in order to appear great ... such ... are often the expedients of the neurotic.

If I didn't have this affliction, I would be the first. As a rule the if-clause contains an unfulfillable condition, or the patient's own arrangement, which only he can change.

In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.

Tears and complaints - the means which I have called water power - can be an extremely useful weapon for disturbing cooperation and reducing other to a condition of slavery.

The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.

It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.

What person, confined in a small room with nothing but a tea-cosy, will not eventually put the tea-cosy on their head?

All failures are so because they lack social interest.

Every neurotic is partly in the right.

If you wish to educate a child who has gone wrong, then you must, above all, keep your attention fixed on the intersection of two charmed circles.

The self-bound individual always forgets that his self would be safeguarded better and automatically the more he prepares himself for the welfare of mankind, and that in this respect no limits are set for him.

It is easy to believe that life is long and one's gifts are vast -- easy at the beginning, that is. But the limits of life grow more evident; it becomes clear that great work can be done rarely, if at all.

Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.

To be human means to feel inferior.

Play is a child's work and this is not a trivial pursuit.

Man knows much more than he understands.

I am grateful for the idea that has used me.

My psychology belongs to everyone.

The Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Mathematics is pure language - the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.

In this case, the neurotic resembles a human being who looks up to God, commends himself to His ways, and then religiously awaits how the Lord will guide him; he is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

To injure another person through atonement is one of the most subtle devices of the neurotic, as when, for example, he indulges in self-accusations.

My difficulties belong to me!

All failures - neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes - are failures because they are lacking in social interest

More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.

The style of life is a unity because it has grown out of the difficulties of early life and out of the striving for a goal.

Nobody adopts antisocial behaviour unless they fear that they will fail if they remain on the social side of life.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

The human mind shows an urge to capture into fixed forms through unreal assumptions, that is, fictions, that which is chaotic, always in flux, and incomprehensible. Serving this urge, the child quite generally uses a scheme in order to act and to find his way. We proceed much the same when we divide the earth by meridians and parallels, for only thus do we obtain fixed points which we can bring into a relationship with one another.

The goal of the human soul is conquest, perfection, security, superiority.

There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.

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.

There is no thing as a man who does not create mathematics and yet is a fine mathematics teacher. Textbooks, course material-these do not approach in importance the communication of what mathematics is really about, of where it is going, and of where it currently stands with respect to the specific branch of it being taught. What really matters is the communication of the spirit of mathematics. It is a spirit that is active rather than contemplative-a spirit of disciplined search for adventures of the intellect. Only as adventurer can really tell of adventures.

He used to say to his melancholia patients: "You can be cured in fourteen days if you follow this prescription.Try to think every day how you can please someone.

There is only one reason for an individual to side-step to the useless side : the fear of a defeat on the useful side.

The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized in the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and humanity.

The only worthwhile achievements of man are those which are socially useful.

It is well known that those who do not trust themselves never trust others.

Violence as a way of gaining power... is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security...

Everything can always be different!

A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.

We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.

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.

seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.

Follow your heart always, and remember to take your head along with you.

It is very obvious that we are not influenced by "facts" but by our interpretation of the facts.

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!

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.

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.

Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.

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.