Alfred Korzybski Quotes

To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.

The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a 'semantic disturbance' is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized.

There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

The map is not the territory.

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.

If all people learned to think in the non Aristotelian manner of quantum mechanics, the world would change so radically that most of what we call "stupidity" and even a great deal of what we consider "insanity" might disappear, and the "intractable" problems of war, poverty and injustice would suddenly seem a great deal closer to solution.

Words don't mean, people mean.

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

These 'philosophers', etc., seem unaware, to give a specific example, that by teaching and preaching 'identity', which is empirically non-existent in this actual world, they are neurologically training future generations in the pathological identifications found in the 'mentally' ill or maladjusted.

God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.

Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.

We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.

A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it.

The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.

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.

It is a fallacy of the old schools to divide man into parcels, elements, thoughts, emotions, intuitions, etc. All human faculties consist of an interconnected whole.

Identification makes general sanity and complete adjustment impossible. Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.

If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.

If we, who live outside asylums, act as if we lived in a fictitious world- that is to say, if we are consistent with our beliefs- we cannot adjust ourselves to actual conditions, and so fall into many avoidable semantic difficulties. But the so-called normal person practically never abides by his beliefs, and when his beliefs are building for him a fictitious world, he saves his neck by not abiding by them. A so-called "insane" person acts upon his beliefs, and so cannot adjust himself to a world which is quite different from his fancy.

I think therefore I seem to be.

He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.

Identity is invariably false to facts.

Whatever you say it is, is simply what YOU SAY it is.

Who rules our symbols, rules us.

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.