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.
I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem a matter of indifference to me.
Even on the cross He did not hide Himself from sight; rather, He made all creation witness to the presence of its Maker.
A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.
We're children. We're supposed to be childish.
Democracy was the right of the people to choose their own tyrant.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.