Alfred Kinsey Quotes

The human mind shows an urge to capture into fixed forms through unreal assumptions, that is, fictions, that which is chaotic, always in flux, and incomprehensible. Serving this urge, the child quite generally uses a scheme in order to act and to find his way. We proceed much the same when we divide the earth by meridians and parallels, for only thus do we obtain fixed points which we can bring into a relationship with one another.

To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.

There is no order of things except in the human mind.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

Life is very, very simple and easy to understand, but we complicate it with the beliefs and ideas that we create.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

It's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.

We, as a people, we have a strong need to categorize everything. We put labels on everything and it's a totally understandable need because we are animals and we need to understand order and where to fit in.

I love finding - or inventing - ways to categorize people.

I love taxonomies, categories, ways of dividing people into groups.

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

Genres are just names.

People love to put human beings or actors in boxes.

Reality is mind-made.

That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.

If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

Labels don't mean much to me one way or another -- except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work -- one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for.

Categories are gibberish to me. I understand - it helps people organize their thoughts. But you can't go too far with it.

Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws ('a world of identical cases') as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:-we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.