Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element that plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, therefore he called his psychology “Individual Psychology” (Orgler 1976). These Alfred Adler quotes will motivate you.
Best Alfred Adler Quotes
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Follow your heart but take your brain with you.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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!” ~ Alfred Adler
- “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “It is very obvious that we are not influenced by “facts”
but by our interpretation of the facts.” ~ Alfred Adler - “Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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!” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Every pampered child becomes a hated child…. There is no greater evil than the pampering of children.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“Follow your heart always, and remember to take your head along with you.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Play is a child’s work and this is not a trivial pursuit.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “It is well known that those who do not trust themselves never trust others.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “The only worthwhile achievements of man are those which are socially useful.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “All failures – neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes – are failures because they are lacking in social interest” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Everything can always be different!” ~ Alfred Adler
- “We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Man knows much more than he understands.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “To be human means to feel inferior.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“The goal of the human soul is conquest, perfection, security, superiority.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Nobody adopts antisocial behaviour unless they fear that they will fail if they remain on the social side of life.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “The test of one’s behavior pattern is their relationship to society, relationship to work and relationship to sex.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“There is only one reason for an individual to side-step to the useless side : the fear of a defeat on the useful side.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “All failures are so because they lack social interest.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “My difficulties belong to me!” ~ Alfred Adler
- “We must never neglect the patient’s own use of his symptoms.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“What person, confined in a small room with nothing but a tea-cosy, will not eventually put the tea-cosy on their head?” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Violence as a way of gaining power… is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security.” ~ Alfred Adler
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“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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory… and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “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.” ~ Alfred Adler
