Adler Quotes

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

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

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.

It is very obvious that we are not influenced by "facts" but by our interpretation of the facts.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

What is courage? Courage is the willingness to risk failure...There is only one danger I find in life, and that, indeed, is a real one. You may take too many precautions.

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

All failures - neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes - are failures because they are lacking in social interest

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

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

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

Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

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.

There is another side to chivalry. If it dispenses leniency, it may with equal justification invoke control.

Follow your heart always, and remember to take your head along with you.

The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.

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

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.

seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.

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

Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.

All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.

Erotic or sexual love can truly be love if it is not selfishly sexual or lustful.

When you stand on the stage you must have a sense that you are addressing the whole world, and that what you say is so important the whole world must listen.

Violence as a way of gaining power... is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

Among Jews, there is an absence of drunkenness, always a fruitful source of domestic strife and misconduct.

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

You have to do something. If you do something, you become somebody. Even a daffodil does something, has a profession. It gives off scent, professionally.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.

Part of recovery is relapse. I dust myself off and move forward again.

You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences.

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing.

Everything can always be different!

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.

But promises based on ignorance always prove disappointing.

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

Think like a photographer. Look at every vignette in your home like it's being shot for a shelter magazine and style accordingly.

Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you.

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can't, you're dead.

It is not only by the questions we have answered that progress may be measured, but also by those we are still asking.