Alfred Adler Quotes

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

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

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.

My psychology belongs to everyone.

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

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

All failures are so because they lack social interest.

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.

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.

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

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

No man can think, feel, will, nor even dream, without everything being defined, conditioned, limited, directed by a goal which floats before him.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

We limit ourselves to normal cases of mutual influence, we find that those people are most capable of being influenced who are most amenable to reason and logic, those whose social feeling has been least distorted. On the contrary, those who thirst for superiority and desire domination are very difficult to influence. Observation teaches us this fact every day.

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.

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.

To be human means to feel inferior.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

We learn in friendship to look with the eyes of another person, to listen with her ears, and to feel with her heart.

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

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.

We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

A fight with a child is always a losing fight: he can never be beaten or won to cooperation by fighting. In these struggles the weakest always carries the day. Something is demanded of him which he refuses to give; something which can never be gained by such means. An incalculable amount of tension and useless effort would be spared in this world if we realized that cooperation and love can never be won by force.

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

Everything can always be different!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Follow your heart but take your brain with you.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

a woman who contributes to the life of mankind by the occupation of motherhood is taking as high a place in the division of human labor as anyone else could take. If she is interested in the lives of her children and is paving the way for them to become fellow men, if she is spreading their interests and training them to cooperate, her work is so valuable that it can never be rightly rewarded. In our own culture the work of a mother is undervalued and often regarded as a not very attractive or estimable occupation. It is paid only indirectly and a woman who makes it her main occupation is generally placed in a position of economic dependence. The success of the family, however, rests equally upon the work of the mother and the work of the father. Whether the mother keeps house or works independently, her work as a mother does not play a lower role than the work of her husband.

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.

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.

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.