"The Map is not the territory" —Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself.

"The menu is not the meal."

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.