Alfred Korzybski Quotes

Those who have reflected on the powerful influence of language on thought will perceive in how different a manner people who speak in different languages are apt to think.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.

It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

Language does our thinking for us.

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

Only where there is language is there world.

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe.

The old languages - at least the ones I know - don't have gender. They don't have gendered pronouns. There's no "he" and "she." A human being is a human being.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.