43 Alfred Adler Quotes That Broaden Your Horizon
Often regarded as the “father of individual psychology”, Alfred W. Adler was an Austrian psychotherapist and medical doctor, who emphasized on the importance of inferiority complex. He believed that the feeling of inferiority plays a vital role in the personal development of humans. According to the Review of General Psychology, Adler was ranked 67th amongst the most recognized psychologist of the 21st century. He was one the only few to state the importance of social elements for nurturing characteristic behaviors in humans. Apart from his twelve-volume set of ‘The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler’, his notable works include The Pattern of Life, The Science of Living, Understanding Human Nature and The Neurotic Constitution. In association with Sigmund Freud and his colleagues, they formed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Adler’s take on subjects such as homosexuality, addiction, birth order, parent education, spirituality, ecology and community are still applied in modern psychology. His thoughts and sayings stressed on inferiority complex, power of psychoanalysis, importance of success and failures to gain experience in life and vitality of expression of human feelings. Read through some of the most intriguing quotes from the father of individual psychology.
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Follow your heart but take your brain with you.
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.
Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
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.
We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.
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.
To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.
We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.
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 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.
Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.
Man knows much more than he understands.
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.
War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.
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.
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.
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.
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.
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 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.
Seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.
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.
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
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.
My difficulties belong to me!
It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The test of one's behavior pattern is their relationship to society, relationship to work and relationship to sex.
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.
