A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.

What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

When I speak it is in order to be heard.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

If you are not working towards something, your life will end with nothing.

Men who attain great heights always have few friends but many admirers, while those who ply the lower reaches of fortune often have many friends but scarcely an admirer in sight

Faces ...I ...don't ...know ...the real ...me

When Tarquin the Proud was asked what was the best mode of governing a conquered city, he replied only by beating down with his staff all the tallest poppies in his garden.

The real attitude of sin in the heart towards God is that of being without God; it is pride, the worship of myself, that is the great atheistic fact in human life.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

Jealousy is cruel as a tomb, its embers are embers of fire.

Shun, as you would the plague, a cleric who from being poor has become wealthy, or who, from being nobody has become a celebrity.

I never knew what top golf was like until I turned professional. Then it was too late.

I'm just trying to make a buck like everyone else.