Alfred Adler Quotes

Follow your heart but take your brain with you.

Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The chief danger in life is that 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

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

It is always 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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.

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

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.

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.

Everything can always be different!

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

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.

Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

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

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.

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.

Far more unwaveringly, the neurotic keeps before his eye his God, his idol, his ideal of personality and clings to his guiding principle, losing sight in the meanwhile of reality, whereas the normal person is always ready to dispense with this crutch, this aid, and reckon unhampered with reality.