Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.
Alfred AdlerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Human beings are driven by feelings of inferiority, which motivate them to strive for improvement and achievement.
Alfred Adler suggests that the essence of being human involves grappling with feelings of inferiority. These feelings create a powerful urge to conquer personal limitations, leading to emotional struggles but also driving individuals towards growth and self-improvement. Ultimately, this pursuit for conquest and overcoming one's inferiorities shapes human experience, impacting emotions and aspirations.
Themes
InferiorityConquestHuman NatureSelf-ImprovementEmotional Agitation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared in a motivational seminar to encourage personal growth.
More from Alfred Adler
All quotes →War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
Alfred AdlerRead
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.
Alfred AdlerRead
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.
Alfred AdlerRead
All failures - neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes - are failures because they are lacking in social interest
Alfred AdlerRead
What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning - and some of them many times over - what do you find? That you can swim? Well - life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!
Alfred AdlerRead
Similar quotes
I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.
Sylvia PlathRead
Every man is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.
Miguel De CervantesRead
But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
Milan KunderaRead
Since only what is material is perceptible, knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God.
Karl MarxRead