Alfred Korzybski Quotes

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.

I know what the structure of the language is.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language.

We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.