Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

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.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

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

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

Being that can be understood is language.

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

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

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.

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

Symbols are important.

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.

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

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

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

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.

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

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Verbal and nonverbal activity is a unified whole, and theory and methodology should be organized or created to treat it as such.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.