Alfred Adler - Hank Aaron - Eleanor Roosevelt - Samuel Johnson - Sun Tzu - Daphne du Maurier - Charles Dickens - Susan Sontag - Virginia Woolf - Hitler’s Most Hated TV -
To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. Alfred Adler, Austrian psychologist, 1870-1937
The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognised in the sense of incompleteness and unfulfilment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and humanity. Alfred Adler
The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violence the emotional agitation. Alfred Adler
To be human means to be inferior. Alfred Adler
Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority. Alfred Adler
I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you’re inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you’ve never seen before. If they do, I’m still looking for it. Hank Aaron
No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Eleanor Roosevelt
There are minds so impatient of inferiority, that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain. Samuel Johnson, cited The Rambler January 1751
A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. Samuel Johnson
Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. Sun Tzu
The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
The girl’s life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman’s original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered, and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame: and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with whom she had sought this interview. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones – those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: A Romance
Life for both sexes – and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement – is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority – it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney – for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination – over other people. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Both Hitler and Stalin suffered from inferiority complexes. History’s Most Hated s1e4: Hitler & Stalin, History 2019