Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

... Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again.

It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

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

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

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

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

There is the name and the thing; the name is a sound which sets a mark on and denotes the thing. The name is no part of the thing nor of the substance; it is an extraneous piece added to the thing, and outside of it.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

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.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.