Ferdinand De Saussure Quotes
I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.
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 psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
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 of languages or another.
Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas...
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
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 freely consent.
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, of which I have spoken.
Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.
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.
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 prime conservative force.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.