A Quote by Ferdinand de Saussure

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Quote Topics

Arbitrary Between Connection

Quote Author

Ferdinand de Saussure
Swiss - Educator
November 26, 1857 - February 22, 1913

Language is a signifier - it points to something. But those somethings change sometimes. Where the line comes down is that change is not in the dictionary first, it's not: change the signifier and the signified will go away.

Kory Stamper

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

Jacques Lacan

Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified.

Roland Barthes

The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.

Peter Kreeft

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

Franz Grillparzer

A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds.

Rudolf Arnheim

I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.

George C. Wolfe

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Jordan Peterson

Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In speaking of community, then, we are speaking of a complex connection not only among human beings or between humans and their homeland but also between human economy and nature, between forest or prairie and field or orchard, and between troublesome creatures and pleasant ones. All neighbors are included.

Wendell Berry

Research at the subatomic quantum level reveals an invisible connection between all particles and all members of a given species. This oneness is being demonstrated in remarkable scientific discoveries. The findings show that physical distance, what we think of as empty space, does not preclude a connection by invisible forces. Obviously there exist invisible connections between our thoughts and our actions. We do not deny this, even though the connection is impervious to our senses.

Wayne Dyer

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Connection exists. There is immanence and transcendence, and everything beyond and in between. My tradition calls this connection God Herself.

T. Thorn Coyle

OWE, v. To have (and to hold) a debt. The word formerly signified not indebtedness, but possession; it meant "own," and in the minds of debtors there is still a good deal of confusion between assets and liabilities.

Ambrose Bierce

We should try to achieve things for ourselves and not rely on former or past family glories with which we have no connection but the arbitrary nature of our birth.

Shirley Franklin

The connection between someone in Leeds and a comedian in Los Angeles would probably never happen if it weren't for MySpace, so it enables friendship and connection far more than it limits it.

Tom Anderson

Not every one knows of the connection between the Indian and the Spanish music, but if they do they seem to have a real reverence for that connection. A love point in music.

Anoushka Shankar

A Quote by Ferdinand de Saussure

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors