Explore Quotes by Alfred Adler

We are not determined by our experiences, but are self-determined by the meaning we give to them; and when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life, we are almost certain to be misguided to some degree. Meanings are not determined by situations. We determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations.

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.

Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself.

Everything can always be different!

An educator's most important task, one might say his holy duty, is to see to it that no child is discouraged at school, and that a child who enters school already discouraged regains his self-confidence through his school and his teacher. This goes hand in hand with the vocation of the educator, for education is possible only with children who look hopefully and joyfully upon the future.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

My difficulties belong to me!

The test of one's behavior pattern is their relationship to society, relationship to work and relationship to sex.

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

Man knows much more than he understands.

It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.

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.

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.

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

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

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.