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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Alfred Korzybski
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Biographical Highlights

Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950)


  • Born 3 July 1879 in Warsaw, Poland.


  • Died 1 March in Sharon, Connecticut.


  • At outbreak of World War I (age 35), volunteered for service in the Second Russian Army; assigned to General Staff Intelligence Department.


  • Sustained hip injury when his horse was shot out from under him, as well as surviving a leg wound and internal injuries.


  • In December 1915, assigned to Camp Petawawa testing grounds in Canada to observe new artillery tests.


  • After collapse of the Russian army and the revolution of 1917, joined the French-Polish army for the duration of the war. Also assisted the U.S. government by lecturing on behalf of the war effort to sell Liberty Bonds.


  • In 1919, met and married Mira Edgerly, an accomplished portrait painter.


  • In 1921, completed and published Manhood of Humanity.


  • Devised the Structural Differential model (originally called the Anthropometer) and applied for U.S. patent in 1923.


  • Presented and published Time-Binding: The General Theory in 1924 to the International Mathematical Congress in Toronto.


  • Under guidance of Dr. William Alanson White, spent two years observing and studying mental illnesses and treatments at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.


  • Completed and published his second book in October 1933, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (originally titled Time-Binding, The General Theory: An Introduction to Humanology).


  • From 1934-1937, traveled around the country giving public and private seminars based on the methodology of general semantics as formulated and discussed in Science and Sanity. Some of the more significant seminar venues included Harvard University, Williams College in California, Olivet College in Michigan, the Barstow School for Girls in Kansas City, and several conducted in Los Angeles.


  • In August 1938, after sefcuring initial funding from Cornelius Crane (Chicago) and Frances Stone Dewing (Massachusetts), founded the Institute of General Semantics in Chicago. He was assisted by M. Kendig who resigned as Headmistress of the Barstow School to move to Chicago and become the Institute's first Education Director.


  • Began regular schedule of delivering seminars at the Institute and various universities throughout the country.


  • With the Institute, moved to Lakeville (Lime Rock), Connecticut, in April 1946 following the post-war housing shortage in Chicago.


  • Continued his exhaustive schedule of seminars until his death on 1 March 1950.


  • His final paper, "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes" was published as a chapter in Perception: An Approach to Personality, edited by Robert R. Blake and Glenn V. Ramsey in 1951.
 

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