We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.
- Alfred Korzybski

3 Questions: "What?"........."So what?"........."Now what?"
- Coro wisdom

"The world we have created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them."
- Albert Einstein

"The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything."
- George Santayana

"If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a 10-foot chain."
- Adlai Stevenson

"Teaching and learning that lead to no significant change in behavior are practically worthless."
– Irving Lee

"Learning to un-learn to learn, for me, best describes the process of learning the discipline theoretically (verbally) and organismically."
– M. Kendig

"Learning is the gradual replacement of fantasy with fact."
- Gifford Pinchot

"The trouble with people is not so much with their ignorance as it is with their knowing so many things that are not so."
- William Alanson White

"You can't no more teach what you ain't learned than you can come from where you ain't been."
- Mark Twain

"A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it."
- Alfred Korzybski

"You can't step into the same river twice."
- Heraclitus

"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"Happiness is not something that happens….It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"We are always getting to live, but never living."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"God may forgive your sins. But your nervous system won't."
- Alfred Korzybski

"The self explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes an explorer of everything else."
- Elias Canetti

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
- Albert Einstein

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits."
- Mark Twain

"Time is but the stream I go fishing in."
- Henry David Thoreau

"It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and only lukewarm defenders among those who may do well under the new."
- Machiavelli

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw

"To progress, man must re-make himself, and he cannot re-make himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor."
- Alexis Carrel

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
- Elvis Costello

Institute of General Semantics

 
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La Sémantique Générale

For an overview of General Semantics in English, click here.

 
Imaginons que vous soyez dans un pays étranger et que vous cherchiez votre chemin. Vous avez une carte qui vous indique les directions à prendre. Vous vous perdez et en demandant votre chemin, vous vous rendez compte que votre carte, si précieuse, n’indiquait pas votre point d’arrivée… ou qu’elle datait de plusieurs années !

Notre langage ressemble à ces cartes que nous utilisons pour décrire, comprendre le monde afin souvent de pouvoir nous repérer et nous guider. La Sémantique générale apprend à réviser ces cartes mentales afin qu’elles soient au plus près de la réalité dans laquelle nous évoluons.

Le langage que nous utilisons influence notre manière de traiter l’information, et vice versa, l’information que nous traitons modifie (ou devrait modifier) la manière dont nous nous exprimons. Plus nous sommes conscients de ces mécanismes, plus nous sommes à même d’ajuster nos représentations de la réalité.

Or, bien des fois, nous nous laissons tenter par la facilité des représentations du monde déjà toute faites car, déjà toutes faites, elles deviennent confortables… et nous sommes tout surpris, voir dépourvus, lorsque les événements ou les faits viennent transformer notre vision, nos attentes. Cette rencontre, ou encore, l’écart entre notre description de la réalité et les événements qui viennent modifier cette description, provoque souvent des effets sur le plan émotionnel, de quelque degré que ce soit, sur plusieurs plans.

La Sémantique générale permet de comprendre ces mécanismes et de choisir les moyens de mieux communiquer avec nous-mêmes et avec les autres. La Sémantique générale permet de voir de « l’extérieur » votre propre langue, et de ne pas se laisser enfermer dans des systèmes de pensée, quelque soit sa valeur à nos yeux car « nous avons tendance à voir le monde tel que les mots nous ont appris à le voir » A. KORZYBSKI, fondateur de la Sémantique générale.

 

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