Semiotics Quotes

“No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.”
― Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

“Language disguises thought.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Codes and semiotic conventions are a challenge for human communication, since they seal off people with a privacy protection label and make them accessible only by means of a barcode that might estrange them from their surroundings but, at the same time, procure them a kind of reassurance in their comfort zone. This dialectical situation may keep them struggling during their entire life. ("The unbreakable code " )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . . ”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.”
― Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics

“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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produces no concept; therefore, it is dumb.”
― Umberto Eco

“This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, an initial semiological dismantling of that language: I had just read Saussure and emerged with the conviction that by treating “collective representations” as sign systems one might hope to transcend pious denunciation and instead account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit bourgeois culture into a universal nature.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“The transference of culture in time can, in large measure, be described as the conservation of sign systems serving as a control on behavior.”
― Doris Bradbury

“Nothing is more important than who controls the signs. To change the world, it is necessary to change the signs that are used to condition people.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Hypersex

“natural language will always remain the basic interpretation of, and reservoir for, the development of the artificial formalized languages of science.”
― Doris Bradbury

“...isn’t it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language---the ability to experience the world through symbols---is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn’t it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and body are one.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogous or abbreviated expression of a known thing is semiotic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as an intentional paraphrase or transmogrification of a known thing is allegoric. The interpretation of the cross as a symbol of divine love is semiotic, because “divine love” describes the fact to be expressed better and more aptly than a cross, which can have many other meanings. On the other hand, an interpretation of the cross is symbolic when it puts the cross beyond all conceivable explanations, regarding it as expressing an as yet unknown and incomprehensible fact of a mystical or transcendent, i.e., psychological, nature, which simply finds itself most appropriately represented in the cross.”
― C.G. Jung, Psychological Types

“...no theory of hermeneutic legitimation can be indeed legitimate if not by the process of hermeneutic reading… At the origin of the hermeneutic practice, there is a circle; it does not matter how holy or how vicious.”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“One does not speak about history but the present, semiotics of systems with production in not only one but the system of movements. System of paradigms of the past, or systems of paradigms, and the system and systems of future paradigms, in positive theory of art.”
― Vladan Kuzmanovic

“True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden—if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious—but because they are naturalised.”
― Roland Barthes

“It was not Gilda and a racquet being used reflexively to some purpose. It was not Gilda using a racquet. It was one thing, maybe you could call it a Gilda-racquet-court-net-game-situation-two-other-players-wind-sunshine object. But there was only one thing there. To seperate us out would be to miss the reality.”
― Steven L. Peck, Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of Rats

“Perception is always interrogative and conditional and is invariably based (even if we do not realize it) on a bet.”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“The task of general semiotics is that of tracing a single formal structure which underlies all these phenomena, this structure being that of the inference which generates interpretation.
The task of specific semiotics, on the other hand, will be that of establishing—according to the sign system in question—the rules of greater or lesser semiotic necessity for inferences (institutionalization rules).”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“Perhaps we are, somewhere, the deep impulse which generates semiosis, And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress, signifying systems and communicational processes. The map of semiosis, as defined at a given stage of historical development (with the debris carried over from previous semiosis), tells us who we are and what (or how) we think.”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“If metaphors require an underlying cultural framework, then the heiroglyphhic language of the gods cannot be a merely primitive stage of human consciousness: it needs the presence of both the symbolic language of heroes and the epistolary language of me as its starting point. Thus Vico is not speaking of a linear development from a metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a continual, cyclical activity.
The language of the gods is a heap of unrelated synedoches and metonymies…”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer’s precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in. The success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects; encyclopedia. In this perspective, metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural framework, on the basis, that is, of a universe of content that is already organized into networks of interpretation, which decide semiotically) the identities and differences of properties.”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“There comes a time when one has to make up one’s mind and choose which side one is on. The catoptric universe is a reality which can give the impression of virtuality, whereas the semiotic universe is a virtuality which can give the impression of reality.”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“There is no reason to assume that the unceasing forward march of techne will not eventually achieve a mimesis which replaces a natural world with an intelligible artificial one. If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organizer of reality, then surely it is man, not the simulacrum, who is turned into an abstraction.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“To tune truly in to the frequency of truth, theo-semioticians need a sound system; prayer as your subwoofer, fasting as your equalizer, Spirit-testing as your noise-cancellation, and community as your surround sound.”
― Leonard Sweet, Decoding the Divine: Unveiling the Sacred Through Semiotics

“Signs are important because they can mean something other than themselves”
― Sean Hall, This Means This, This Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics

“For “Copito de Nieve”, [...] the contact with the tire seems to be something affective, possessive, and somehow symbolic. From it he can have a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living: investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols; a first daybreak of culture in the long biological night. To do this the gorilla possesses only an old tire, an artefact of human production, alien to him, lacking any symbolic potentiality, naked of meanings, abstract. Looking at it, you would not say that much could be derived from it. And yet what, more than an empty circle, can contain all the symbols you might want to attribute to it? Perhaps identifying himself with it, the gorilla is about to reach, in the depths of silence, the springs from which language burst forth, to establish a flow of relationships between his thoughts and the unyielding, deaf evidence of the facts that determine his life . . .”
― Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar

“Eco's emphasis is a productivist one: his view of sign production, and especially of the mode he calls invention, associating it with art and creativity, is from the perspective of the maker, the speaker, the artist, the producer of signs. But what about the woman? She has no access to the codes of the invisible city which represents her and absents her; she is not in the place of Eco's "subject of semiosis"-homo faber, the city builder, the producer of signs. Nor is she in the repre­sentation which inscribes her as absent. The woman cannot transform the codes; she can only transgress them, make trouble, provoke, per­vert, turn the representation into a trap ("this ugly city, this trap"). For semiotics too, finally, the founding tale remains the same. Though now the place of the female subject in language, in discourse, and in the social may be understood another way, it is an equally impossible position. She now finds herself in the empty space between the signs, in a void of meaning, where no demand is possible and no code available; or, going back to the cinema, she finds herself in the place of the female spectator, between the look of the camera (the masculine representation) and the image on the screen (the specular fixity of the feminine representation), not one or the other but both and neither.”
― Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema