142 Quotes by Alfred Adler

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.

Nobody adopts antisocial behaviour unless they fear that they will fail if they remain on the social side of life.

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.

The human mind shows an urge to capture into fixed forms through unreal assumptions, that is, fictions, that which is chaotic, always in flux, and incomprehensible. Serving this urge, the child quite generally uses a scheme in order to act and to find his way. We proceed much the same when we divide the earth by meridians and parallels, for only thus do we obtain fixed points which we can bring into a relationship with one another.

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

There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.

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.

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.