Quotes by 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.
• 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 no such thing as talent. There is pressure.
• 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.
• The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
• The only normal people are the one's you don't know very well.
• 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.
• The test of one's behavior pattern is their relationship to society, relationship to work and relationship to sex.
• A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
• 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.
• Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.
• To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.
• 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.
• War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
• War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.
• We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.
• We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.
• The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.
• It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.
• 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.
• 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.
• Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
• 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.
• 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.
• The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
• Man knows much more than he understands.
• Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
• My difficulties belong to me!
• 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.
• We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.
• It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
• Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.
• Follow your heart, but take your brain with you.
• Life is like a camera: focus on what's important, capture the good times, develop from the negatives, and if things don't work out, take another shot!