27 Motivational Quotes By Alfred Korzybski That You Can’t Leave Out
The map is not the territory.
God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.
Whatever you say it is, it isn't.
Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.
If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.
Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.
To regard human beings as tools - as instruments - for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker - they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement.
Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
Who rules our symbols, rules us.
Words don't mean, people mean.
The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...
A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it.
As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.
We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.
It seems evident that everything which exists in nature, is natural, no matter how simple or complicated a phenomenon it is; and on no occasion can the so-called 'supernatural' be anything else than a completely natural law, though it may, at the moment, be above and beyond the present understanding.
The objective level is not words, and cannot be reached by words alone. We must point our finger and be silent, or we will never reach this level.
 Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation. ){kind=small}
Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.
The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of 'identity.'
I am the same kind of moron as the rest of you, it's the method that does the work, for me as well as for you.
If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.
It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification - the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life.
I think therefore I seem to be.
Any proposition containing the word "is" creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.
I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.
Different ‘philosophies’ represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.
