Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, withi….

It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, i….

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other..

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those….

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas....

The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic….

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent..

Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise..

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

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs..

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass..

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth..

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, ….

Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as….

In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the ….

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could n….

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary..

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar..

Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.

I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes..

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula..