To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.
Interpretation
Words can only describe reality but cannot fully capture it, much like using a lamp to find darkness is inherently contradictory.
Alfred Korzybski's quote highlights the limitations of language in expressing the complexities of reality. It suggests that while words are a useful tool for communication and understanding, they can never encapsulate the entirety of human experience and perception. Attempting to describe reality solely through language may lead to misunderstandings, as words can only point towards the truths of existence without fully embracing them.
In practice
In a speech about the limitations of communication, one might quote this to emphasize the gap between words and experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.
[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying.
Neither worse then nor better is a thing made by being praised.
I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.
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