Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.
Alfred AdlerRead
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Normality is subjective and often depends on our close relationships with others.
This quote by Alfred Adler suggests that what is considered 'normal' varies greatly depending on individual perspectives and familiarity with a person. The deeper we know someone, the more we uncover the complexities and quirks that define their behavior, which challenges the notion of a universal standard for normality.
Themes
NormalityPerceptionRelationshipsUnderstandingHumanity
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker addressing a group of psychology students might use this quote to illustrate the complexity of human behavior.
More from Alfred Adler
All quotes βWar 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
Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?
Margaret AtwoodRead
Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.
Eugene V. DebsRead
People must be taken as they are, and we should never try make them or ourselves better by quarreling with them.
Edmund BurkeRead
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.
David Foster WallaceRead
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Let soul speak with the silent articulation of a face.
RumiRead