Michel de Montaigne Quotes

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

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.

An object never serves the same function as its image - or its name.

If I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood.

Names govern the world.

They say that nameless things change constantly—that names fix them in place like pins.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

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

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

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

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

Naming is a privilege of reason and the province of bullies. We name to tame and to maim; to honor the great, the dead, and ourselves.

In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.

As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

Quit calling me Grey. It makes me sound like I’m a boy. Like Dorian Gray.” “Dorian who?” I sighed. “Just think up something else. Plain old Nora works too, you know.” “Sure thing, Gumdrop.” I grimaced. “I take that back. Let’s stick with Grey.

We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren't.

Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before.

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

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

Dangerous thing, a name. Someone might catch hold of you by it, mightn't they?