Top 60 Alfred Adler Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Alfred Adler

Featured in: Quotes About the Brain

2. “Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.”

— Alfred Adler

Featured in: Commitment Quotes, Quotes About Work, Quotes About Trust

3. “Everything can always be different!”

— Alfred Adler

4. “Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself.”

— Alfred Adler

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Obstacles Quotes

5. “Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.”

— Alfred Adler

6. “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 Adler

7. “You can be healed of depression if every day you begin the first thing in the morning to consider how you will bring a real joy to someone else.”

— Alfred Adler

8. “There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.”

— Alfred Adler

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

— Alfred Adler

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

— Alfred Adler

11. “To be human means to feel inferior.”

— Alfred Adler

12. “I am grateful for the idea that has used me.”

— Alfred Adler

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

— Alfred Adler

14. “My psychology belongs to everyone.”

— Alfred Adler

15. “Play is a child’s work and this is not a trivial pursuit.”

— Alfred Adler

16. “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.”

— Alfred Adler

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

— Alfred Adler

18. “A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”

— Alfred Adler

19. “It is well known that those who do not trust themselves never trust others.”

— Alfred Adler

20. “All failures are so because they lack social interest.”

— Alfred Adler

21. “All failures – neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes – are failures because they are lacking in social interest.”

— Alfred Adler

22. “There is only one reason for an individual to side-step to the useless side : the fear of a defeat on the useful side.”

— Alfred Adler

23. “To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.”

— Alfred Adler

24. “The only worthwhile achievements of man are those which are socially useful.”

— Alfred Adler

25. “Mathematics is pure language – the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.”

— Alfred Adler

26. “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.”

— Alfred Adler

27. “The self-bound individual always forgets that his self would be safeguarded better and automatically the more he prepares himself for the welfare of mankind, and that in this respect no limits are set for him.”

— Alfred Adler

28. “We must never neglect the patient’s own use of his symptoms.”

— Alfred Adler

29. “The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized in the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and humanity.”

— Alfred Adler

30. “Every neurotic is partly in the right.”

— Alfred Adler

31. “If you wish to educate a child who has gone wrong, then you must, above all, keep your attention fixed on the intersection of two charmed circles.”

— Alfred Adler

32. “A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view.”

— Alfred Adler

33. “What person, confined in a small room with nothing but a tea-cosy, will not eventually put the tea-cosy on their head?”

— Alfred Adler

34. “In this case, the neurotic resembles a human being who looks up to God, commends himself to His ways, and then religiously awaits how the Lord will guide him; he is nailed to the cross of his fiction.”

— Alfred Adler

35. “We are self-determined by the meaning we give to our experiences; and there is probably something of a mistake always involved when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations. There.”

— Alfred Adler

36. “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.”

— Alfred Adler

37. “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.”

— Alfred Adler

38. “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.”

— Alfred Adler

39. “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.”

— Alfred Adler

40. “War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.”

— Alfred Adler

41. “To injure another person through atonement is one of the most subtle devices of the neurotic, as when, for example, he indulges in self-accusations.”

— Alfred Adler

42. “To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.”

— Alfred Adler

43. “In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown.”

— Alfred Adler

44. “It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.”

— Alfred Adler

45. “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.”

— Alfred Adler

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

46. “It is easy to believe that life is long and one’s gifts are vast – easy at the beginning, that is. But the limits of life grow more evident; it becomes clear that great work can be done rarely, if at all.”

— Alfred Adler

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

— Alfred Adler

48. “A private meaning is in fact no meaning at all. Meaning is only possible in communication: a word which meant something to one person only would really be meaningless. It is the same with our aims and actions; their only meaning is their meaning for others. Every human being strives for significance; but people always make mistakes if they do not see that their whole significance must consist in their contribution to the lives of others. An.”

— Alfred Adler

49. “We learn in friendship to look with the eyes of another person, to listen with her ears, and to feel with her heart.”

— Alfred Adler

50. “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.”

— Alfred Adler