Source: Beyond Hypocrisy, 1992, Doublespeak Dictionary (within Beyond Hypocrisy), p. 161.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words."
You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops."
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.
1910 - 1935, The mysteries of the forest' (1934)
Source: Nippon.com Profile/Article by Julian Ryall - Woman Arborist Heals Trees, Parks, Souls https://www.nippon.com/en/people/e00096/ - 9 May 2016 - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20211107072427/https://www.nippon.com/en/people/e00096/
La literatura es un vasto bosque y las obras maestras son los lagos, los árboles inmensos o extrañísimos, las elocuentes flores preciosas o las escondidas grutas, pero un bosque también está compuesto por árboles comunes y corrientes, por yerbazales, por charcos, por plantas parásitas, por hongos y por florecillas silvestres.
2666: A Novel (2008)
Source: Fugitive Pieces
Emperor and Galilean (1873), as quoted by Lester B. Pearson in his address on accepting the Nobel Peace Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway (10 December 1957) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1957/pearson-acceptance.html
