God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.Collection: Forgiveness
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.Collection: Alone
There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
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.
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.
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.Collection: Confused
To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.Collection: Reality
The map is not the territory.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Use
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.Collection: War
Words don't mean, people mean.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Self Esteem
Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.Collection: Knowledge
A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it.Collection: Self Improvement
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.Collection: Faith
The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.Collection: World
We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.Collection: Missing
I think therefore I seem to be.Collection: Thinking
Identification makes general sanity and complete adjustment impossible. Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.Collection: Self Esteem
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.Collection: Old School
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.Collection: Faith
Any object of thought is both 'more than what we think, and different'.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Levels
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.Collection: Two
Who rules our symbols, rules us.Collection: Symbols
He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.Collection: Doe
Identity is invariably false to facts.Collection: Self Esteem
Whatever you say about something, it is not.Collection: Truth
Second order effects, such as belief in belief, makes fanaticism.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Simple
Whatever you say it is, is simply what YOU SAY it is.Collection: Whatever You Say
Different ‘philosophies’ represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.Collection: Philosophy
It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.Collection: Philosopher
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.Collection: Two Nations
What we call progress consists in coordinating ideas with realities.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Stupid
Whatever you may say something is, it is not!Collection: May
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.Collection: Ideas
The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of 'identity.'Collection: Identity
Riches I need not, nor man's empty praise.Collection: Self Esteem
Psycho-galvonic experiments show clearly that every emotion or thought is always connected with some electrical current.Collection: Psycho
One would have to say "in the end everything is a gag, etc" because everything is infinitely more than just a gag. The same applies to other "is"-statements such as "Laughter is an instant vacation"Collection: Laughter
Mathematics and logic have been proved to be one; a fact from which it seems to follow that mathematics may successfully deal with non-quantitative problems in a much broader sense than was suspected to be possible.Collection: May