Alfred Adler Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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.

Alfred Adler
The mathematician learns early to accept no fact, to believe no statement, however apparently reasonable or obvious or trivial, until it has been proved, rigorously and totally by a series of steps proceeding from universally accepted first principles.

Alfred Adler
The goal of the human soul is conquest, perfection, security, superiority.

Alfred Adler
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.

Alfred Adler
Mathematics is pure language — the language of science.

Alfred Adler
The essential feature of mathematical creativity is the exploration, under the pressure of powerful implosive forces, of difficult problems for whose validity and importance the explorer is eventually held accountable by reality.

Alfred Adler
In this case, the neurotic resembles a human being who looks up to God, commends himself to His ways, and then religiously awaits how the Lord will guide him; he is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

Alfred Adler
If truth is a path, then science explores it, and the brief stops along the way are where technologies begin (they build towns and pave a highway). Technology is results, science is process; though the two fuse and separate and then fuse once more, as ends and means must, their opposition is profound.

Alfred Adler
Mathematics, like chess, requires too direct and personal a confrontation to allow graceful defeat.

Alfred Adler
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.

Alfred Adler
Mathematics is whatever mathematicians are doing.

Alfred Adler
Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.

Alfred Adler
To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.

Alfred Adler
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.

Alfred Adler
Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.

Alfred Adler
It is well known that those who do not trust themselves never trust others.

Alfred Adler
To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.

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

Alfred Adler
The neurotic... clings to the straw of his fiction... arbitrarily ascribes reality to it, and seeks to realize it in the world. For this the fiction is unfit; it is still more unfit when, as in the psychoses, it is elevated to a dogma or anthropomorphized.

Alfred Adler
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.

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

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 therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom of responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.

Alfred Adler