Jacques Derrida Quotes

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.

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.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

Language is memory and metaphor.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

Words are the small change of thought.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

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.

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

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

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

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

Things are symbols of themselves.