
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
Unsourced
Source: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1979, p. 30
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
Unsourced
“If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes.”
Philosophia Botanica (1751), aphorism 210. Trans. Frans A. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735-1789 (1971), 80.
Edition:Institute of General Semantics, 1995, p. 58.
Science and Sanity (1933)
“Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes…”
Interview in High Times (2003)
Context: Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.
Variant translation: Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, because things came first, and their names subsequently.
Other quotes
Source: As quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957) by Stillman Drake, p. 92
Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 1-10, p. 21-22
On the importance of naming in “INTERVIEW WITH DANEZ SMITH” http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-danez-smith/ in The White Review (June 2018)