What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Je ne sais si je n’ai déjà dit quelque part que la Mathématique est l’art de donner le même nom à des choses différentes.

Part of the unknown reality, then, is hidden beneath language and the enforced pattern of accustomed words-so, for an exercise, look about your environment. Make up new, different 'words' for the objects that you see about you. Pick up any object, for example. Hold it for a few seconds, feel its texture, look at its color, and spontaneously give it a new name by uttering the sounds that come into your mind. See how the sounds bring out certain aspects of the object that you may not have noticed before. The new word will fit as much as the old one did. It may, in fact, fit better. Do this with many objects, following the same procedure. You can instead say the name of any object backwards. In such ways you break up to some extent the automatic patterning of familiar phrases, so that you can perceive the individuality that is within each object.

People give names to persons and things, and then suppose that if they know the names, they know that which the names refer to.

The great thing about creating something is that you get to give it a name.

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ Is that it, Daneel?”
Daneel paused, then said, “I am not certain what is meant by the smell of a rose, but if a rose on Earth is the common flower that is called a rose on Aurora, and if by its ‘smell’ you mean a property that can be detected, sensed, or measured by human beings, then surely calling a rose by another sound-combination — and holding all else equal — would not affect the smell or any other of its intrinsic properties.”
“True. And yet changes in name do result in changes in perception where human beings are concerned.”
“I do not see why, Partner Elijah.”
“Because human beings are often illogical, Daneel. It is not an admirable characteristic.

In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.

I think I have already said somewhere that mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all.

For even the simplest act of naming a thing is an act of thinking—of comparing one thing with others, selecting certain features in common, ignoring what is different, and making an imaginary category.

We perceive existence by means of words and names. To this or that vague, potential thing I will give a name, and it will exist thereafter, and its existence will be clearly perceived. The name enables me to see it. I can call it by its name, and I can see it for what it is.

One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes a little bit harder to understand things than it would have been if they had been named differently.

Rose girl, bearing your posies, </br> What are you coming to sell? </br> Is it yourself or your roses, </br> Or yourself and your roses as well?

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.