Quotes from Alfred Adler

Life happens at the level of events, not words.

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.

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

The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized as the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and of humanity.

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

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

Man knows much more than he understands.

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.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

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

Play is a child's work and this is not a trivial pursuit.

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

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.

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.

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 greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

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

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

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

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.

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 can comprehend every single life phenomenon, as if the past, the present, and the future together with a superordinate, guiding idea were present in it in traces.

All neurotic symptoms have as their object the task of safeguarding the patient's self-esteem and thereby also the lifeline into which he has grown.