“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.”
名不正，则言不顺
Paraphrased as a chinese proverb stating "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name."
Source: The Analects of Confucius
Source: The Analects, Chapter XIII
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Confucius269
Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher -551–-479 BCRelated quotes
“They were most correct, according to their god.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) Irish novelist, playwright, and poet
The Expelled (1946)
“Politically correct is the language of cowardice.”
Billy Connolly (1942) British comedian
An Audience With Billy - 1985
Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher
Source: Science and Sanity (1933), p. 20.
Context: The only link between the verbal and objective world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all "knowledge" is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex of relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order. From this point of view, all language can be considered as names for unspeakable entities on the objective level, be it things or feelings, or as names of relations. In fact... we find that an object represents an abstraction of a low order produced by our nervous system as the result of a sub-microscopic events acting as stimuli upon the nervous system.
Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi (1941–2001) Pakistani Sufi spiritual leader, poet, author
An introduction to this book
The Religion of God (2000)
“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“This is a typical journalistic statement: It is correct, but it is not the truth.”
Helmut Kohl (1930–2017) former chancellor of West Germany (1982-1990) and then the united Germany (1990-1998)
Das ist eine klassische journalistische Behauptung. Sie ist zwar richtig, aber sie ist nicht die Wahrheit.
ARD-Tagesthemen (February 22, 1994)
Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice
On due process, dissenting in In Re Winship, 397 U.S. 358 (1970).
“Live according to the one and only truth and surrender to the trend of truth.”
Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community
Flow of Divine Guidance (vol.1)
Richard Whately (1787–1863) English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian
Introduction, p. 17
Elements of Rhetoric (1828)