Alfred Adler

Man knows much more than he understands.

Alfred Adler (1870-02-07 – 1937-05-28) was an Austrian medical doctor and psychologist.

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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.
  • From a new translation of "Progress in Individual Psychology," [1923] a journal article by Alfred Adler, in the AAISF/ATP Archives.

• To be human means to feel inferior.
  • Statement of 1933, as quoted in Contemporary Theories and Systems in Psychology (1960) by Benjamin B. Wolman, p. 288

• Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
  • What Life Should Mean to You (1937), p. 14

• It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
  • Quoted in: Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom (1939), ch. 5
  • Problems of Neurosis (1929)

• Man knows much more than he understands.
  • 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