Alfred Adler Quotes

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

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.

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.

More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.

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

In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.

In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown.

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 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.

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

It is one of the triumphs of human wit … to conquer by humility and submissiveness … to make oneself small in order to appear great … such … are often the expedients of the neurotic.

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