Quotes About Communication

We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.

I am receiving and giving in the same gesture.

One does not write solely for oneself, or solely for truth, but not simply for others either. One writes. That is all, and in doing so one aims at all of that at once. Those who write imply that all of this can happen in the same movement.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

In all dialogue there is an element of concrete universality.

The first exterior contact, the first exteroceptive stimulus, is the human voice.

There is no contradiction between reflection as enveloping the past and the past as enveloping my present, because we are communicating through the depth-dimension. According to the depth-dimension, we are in the past and the past lives in us...We are moments of the open field...which is Sinngenesis, sense in genesis, emerging once and for all.

People would be very unhappy if they were to look closely at what lies beneath the words they use so readily. This is why they prefer, for the most part, not to do so.

Writers don't have the impression that they are creating or inventing because they are, in effect, in the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of their landscape.

Far from being limited to the first years, language acquisition is coextensive with the very exercise of language.

Language is the system of differentiations through which the individual articulates his relation to the world.

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.

The possibility of a universal grammar thus remains problematic, since language is made up of significations in the state of being born. This is the case because language is in movement and is not fixed.

Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the 'I' into the other person's perspective.

When I am listening, it is not necessary that I have an auditory perception of the articulated sounds but that the conversation pronounces itself within me. It summons me and grips me; it envelops and inhabits me to the point that I cannot tell what comes from me and what from it. Whether speaking or listening, I project myself into the other person, I introduce him into my own self.

The universe is defined not by what one sees, what one says, but precisely by what one does not see, precisely what one does not say: by the difference between the one and the other.

Saussure may show that each act of expression becomes significant only as a modulation of a general system of expression and only insofar as it is differentiated from other linguistic gestures. The marvel is that before Saussure we did not know anything about this, and that we forget it again each time we speak--to begin with when we speak of Saussure's ideas.

Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for what these linguistic gestures mean and gain us such complete access to that we seem to have no further need of them to refer to it finally appears at the intersection of all of them.

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

The derangement of the senses is to break through the partitions between them in order to regain their indivision--And through this, a thought not mine but theirs...Things speak through me.

Perception is already expression.

Advertising must respect the intelligence of its audience and if it does not prompt them to think, it will be instantly dismissed.

As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.

I've convinced myself - I hope I'm right - that children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth.