Quotes About Semiotics

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

Signs and symbols rule the world, not words nor laws.

A mark is just a symbol, and symbols can change.

My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.

This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.

We think only in signs.

Signs are of three classes, namely, Icons (or images), Indices, and Symbols. Article 6. An icon is a sign which stands for its object because as a thing perceived it excites an idea naturally allied to the idea that object would excite.

Symbols carry different meanings in different settings. - Robert Langdon

Know what a symbol is?...Shit that stands for shit.

In complex trains of thought, signs are indispensable.

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.

meaning is born out of the erosion of words, significations are born out of the erosion of signs

He does not define concepts, he does not analyse them, he does not criticize them: he murders them (but the crime is never perfect).

The Navy speaks in symbols, and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.

People have the idea that an image must stand for something else, that the real meaning needs to be described with language. Instead it is the image itself that is the meaning.

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

It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.

lost. So the /p/ is in a way present, though not simply so. It is carried as a trace in the /b/, necessarily

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights...How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before!...There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

Derrida is my absolute god!

Even symbols decayed.