Ferdinand de Saussure Quotes

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

Language turned apes like us into civil creatures.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

Reading or written language is a cultural invention that necessitated totally new connections among structures in the human brain underlying language, perception, cognition, and, over time, our emotions.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

Language is a social art.

What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.

Language makes infinite use of finite media.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Speech is one of the marvels that characterize man, and also one of the most difficult spontaneous creations that have been accomplished by nature.

I guess my diction just isn't very good.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.