142 Quotes by Alfred Adler

We live upon the contributions of our ancestors. Nature is a good scavenger. She soon gets rid of her rubbish.

The widespread belief that Yuppies as a class would perish from Brie-cheese poisoning turned out to be over-optimistic.

Every pampered child becomes a hated child.... There is no greater evil than the pampering of children.

Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.

It is one of the triumphs of human wit ... to conquer by humility and submissiveness ... to make oneself small in order to appear great ... such ... are often the expedients of the neurotic.

If I didn't have this affliction, I would be the first. As a rule the if-clause contains an unfulfillable condition, or the patient's own arrangement, which only he can change.

In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.

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.

The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.