Alfred Adler - Collected Quotes

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

"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, "Mathematics and Creativity", New Yorker Magazine, 1972) 

"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, "Mathematics and Creativity", New Yorker Magazine, 1972) 

"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, "Mathematics and Creativity", New Yorker Magazine, 1972)

"If truth is a path, then science explores it, and the brief stops along the way are where technologies begin (they build towns and pave a highway). Technology is results, science is process; though the two fuse and separate and then fuse once more, as ends and means must, their opposition is profound." (Alfred Adler, Atlantic Monthly Vol. 279 (2), 1997) 

"Mathematics, like chess, requires too direct and personal a confrontation to allow graceful defeat." (Alfred Adler)

"Mathematics is pure language — the language of science." (Alfred Adler)

"The mathematician learns early to accept no fact, to believe no statement, however apparently reasonable or obvious or trivial, until it has been proved, rigorously and totally by a series of steps proceeding from universally accepted first principles." (Alfred Adler)

"The essential feature of mathematical creativity is the exploration, under the pressure of powerful implosive forces, of difficult problems for whose validity and importance the explorer is eventually held accountable by reality." (Alfred Adler)