Octavio Paz Quotes

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

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.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

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.

Symbols are important.

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

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

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

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

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

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

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.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

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.

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

Words are but the signs of ideas.

My use of language is part and parcel of my message.

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Words are the small change of thought.