Ferdinand de Saussure Quotes

30 quotes in 490 categories

• Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all…
• Of all social institutions language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a…
• Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
• In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely…
• Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
• Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law
• Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same…
• A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
• The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
• Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
• Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
• Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations,…
• In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not…
• Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
• In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance,…
• It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon…
• It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident…
• It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and…
• Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch…
• Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse…

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