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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.

Alfred Adler

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Alfred Adler
Age: 67 †
Born: 1870
Born: February 7
Died: 1937
Died: May 28
Ophthalmologist
Psychiatrist
Psychotherapist
Vienna
Austria
Experience
Experiences
Make
Failure
Cause
Trauma
Called
Congratulations
Causes
Purposes
Suffering
Shock
Purpose
Suits
Success
Suffer

More quotes by Alfred Adler

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Far more unwaveringly, the neurotic keeps before his eye his God, his idol, his ideal of personality and clings to his guiding principle, losing sight in the meanwhile of reality, whereas the normal person is always ready to dispense with this crutch, this aid, and reckon unhampered with reality.
Alfred Adler
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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
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seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.
Alfred Adler
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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
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It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.
Alfred Adler
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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
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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
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Violence as a way of gaining power... is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security.
Alfred Adler
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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.
Alfred Adler
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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.
Alfred Adler
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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.
Alfred Adler
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We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a getaway. We cannot love and be limited.
Alfred Adler
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To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
Alfred Adler
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There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait but if he does not learn it he must perish.
Alfred Adler
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War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
Alfred Adler
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Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.
Alfred Adler
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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
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There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.
Alfred Adler
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It is very obvious that we are not influenced by facts but by our interpretation of the facts.
Alfred Adler
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We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.
Alfred Adler