“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher
Unsourced
Source: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1979, p. 30
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher
Unsourced
“If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes.”
Carl Linnaeus book Philosophia Botanica
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.
Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher
Edition:Institute of General Semantics, 1995, p. 58.
Science and Sanity (1933)
“Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes…”
Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath
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.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer
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
Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer
Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 1-10, p. 21-22
Danez Smith American poet
On the importance of naming in “INTERVIEW WITH DANEZ SMITH” http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-danez-smith/ in The White Review (June 2018)