Alfred Adler quotes

Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor and psychotherapist, well known as the founder of individual psychology. His work emphasized the importance of social influences and the unique motivations of the individual. He developed influential concepts such as the inferiority complex and the drive for personal growth. Here are 56 of his quotes:

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

Alfred Adler

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

Alfred Adler

Man knows much more than he understands.

Alfred Adler

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

Alfred Adler

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

Alfred Adler

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

Alfred Adler

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

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

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

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

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 from among such individuals that all human failures spring.

Alfred Adler

Follow your heart but take your brain with you.

Alfred Adler

Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.

Alfred Adler

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

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

Alfred Adler

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

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

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

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

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

My difficulties belong to me!

Alfred Adler

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

Alfred Adler