87 Quotes by Alfred Korzybski

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.

Identity is invariably false to facts.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Who rules our symbols, rules us.