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Alfred Adler Quotes

Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology" .

Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and who carried psychiatry into the community. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. February 1870 – 28. May 1937  •  Other names Alfred W. Adler
Alfred Adler photo
Alfred Adler: 13 quotes56 likes

Famous Alfred Adler Quotes

“Follow your heart but take your brain with you.”

Alfred Adler

“It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.”

Alfred Adler

Quoted in: Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom (1939), ch. 5
Problems of Neurosis: A Book of Case Histories (1929)

“It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is fro+m among such individuals that all human failures spring.”

Alfred Adler

Source: What Life Could Mean to You

Alfred Adler Quotes about feelings

“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.”

Alfred Adler

From a new translation of "Progress in Individual Psychology" ("Fortschritte der Individualpsychologie", 1923), a journal article by Alfred Adler, in the AAISF/ATP Archives.

“To be human means to feel inferior.”

Alfred Adler

Statement of 1933, as quoted in Contemporary Theories and Systems in Psychology (1960) by Benjamin B. Wolman, p. 288

Alfred Adler Quotes

“Man knows much more than he understands.”

Alfred Adler

As quoted in A Primer of Adlerian Psychology: The Analytic-Behavioural-Cognitive Psychology of Alfred Adler (1999) by Harold H. Mosak and Michael P. Maniacci

“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.”

Alfred Adler

“Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.”

Alfred Adler

What Life Should Mean to You (1937), p. 14

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