In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understandin…

- Mikhail Bakhtin

All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day…

- Mikhail Bakhtin

The catharsis that finalizes Dostoevsky's novels might be - of course inadequately and somewhat rationalistically - expressed in this way: nothing co…

- Mikhail Bakhtin

The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is…

- Mikhail Bakhtin

Words belong to nobody, and in themselves they evaluate nothing. But they can serve any speaker and be used for the most varied and directly contradi…

- Mikhail Bakhtin

Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the p…

- Mikhail Bakhtin

The way in which I create myself is by means of a quest. I go out into the world in order to come back with a self.

- Mikhail Bakhtin

It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his …

- Mikhail Bakhtin

In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

- Mikhail Bakhtin