Alfred Adler Quotes - Page 3

Far more unwaveringly, the neurotic keeps before his eye his God, his idol, his ideal of personality and clings to his guiding principle, losing sight in the meanwhile of reality, whereas the normal person is always ready to dispense with this crutch, this aid, and reckon unhampered with reality.

All failures are so because they lack social interest.

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

What person, confined in a small room with nothing but a tea-cosy, will not eventually put the tea-cosy on their head?

Mathematics is pure language - the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.

If you wish to educate a child who has gone wrong, then you must, above all, keep your attention fixed on the intersection of two charmed circles.

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.

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

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.

It is easy to believe that life is long and one's gifts are vast -- easy at the beginning, that is. But the limits of life grow more evident; it becomes clear that great work can be done rarely, if at all.

To injure another person through atonement is one of the most subtle devices of the neurotic, as when, for example, he indulges in self-accusations.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

He used to say to his melancholia patients: "You can be cured in fourteen days if you follow this prescription.Try to think every day how you can please someone.

Every neurotic is partly in the right.

We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.

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 Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

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.

Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.

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.

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.

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.

Tears and complaints - the means which I have called water power - can be an extremely useful weapon for disturbing cooperation and reducing other to a condition of slavery.

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

I am grateful for the idea that has used me.