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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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Alfred Adler
Age: 67 †
Born: 1870
Born: February 7
Died: 1937
Died: May 28
Ophthalmologist
Psychiatrist
Psychotherapist
Vienna
Austria
Humans
Appear
Great
Humility
Submissiveness
Make
Oneself
Expedients
Small
Triumphs
Often
Neurotic
Science
Wit
Order
Conquer
Human
Triumph

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Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.
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The goal of the human soul is conquest, perfection, security, superiority.
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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.
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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.
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The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
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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.
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We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.
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We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.
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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.
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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.
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It is well known that those who do not trust themselves never trust others.
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Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
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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.
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We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every neurotic is partly in the right.
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A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.
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