Semiotics Quotes

• Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

  Umberto Eco

  Communication, Philosophical, Fields

  "Fifteen Questions with Umberto Eco". Q&A with William R. Dingee, www.thecrimson.com. November 17, 2011.

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• 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

  Lying, Order, Discipline

  Umberto Eco (1976). “A Theory of Semiotics”, p.7, Indiana University Press

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• I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

  Umberto Eco

  Fathers Day, Dad, Believe

  Umberto Eco (2007). “Foucault's Pendulum”, p.60, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The clothes we wear send a message about how the world perceives us.

  Tim Gunn

  Clothes, World, Messages

  "Project Runway’s Top Gunn". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. January/February, 2012.

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• I realize after spending so long working with images, semiotic deconstruction and redeployment becomes second nature. We all speak with images. I guess I look at everything sideways nowadays.

  Michael Salu

  Long, Looks, Realizing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

  Umberto Eco

  Life, Witty, Powerful

  Umberto Eco (2007). “Foucault's Pendulum”, p.104, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

  Umberto Eco

  Lying, Book, Reading

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• One of the reasons I love language is that concerning semiotics, language is an arbitrary sign system, which means the signs within it are free-floating, but we put them in a certain order to get them to have meaning for us. If we left them alone, they'd be like water, like the ocean. It would be just this vast field of free-floating matter or signs, so in this way, I think language and water have much in common. It's only us bringing grammar and syntax and diction and the human need for meaning that orders language, hierarchizes it.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Ocean, Mean, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Men, Vocabulary

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Left Hand Of Darkness”, p.149, Hachette UK

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• When Britney shaves off all her hair and beats paparazzi with umbrellas - that's what celebrities are supposed to do. They're not supposed to be reasonable, middle-aged guys drinking organic tea talking about semiotics.

  Moby

  Drinking, Hair, Talking

  "'The Humility That Comes From Being Hated': Moby Interviewed". Interview with Stephen Dalton, thequietus.com. May 9, 2011.

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• An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.

  James Paul Gee

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  James Paul Gee (2014). “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition”, p.21, Macmillan

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• I believe in the semiotics of clothes. They send a message about how the world perceives us. For me it goes beyond clothes, it's grooming. It's accessories. It's the whole head to toe look.

  Tim Gunn

  Believe, Clothes, World

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• As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

  Umberto Eco

  Philosophy, Lying, Want

  "Umberto Eco: 'People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged'". Interview with Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. November 27, 2011.

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• The good of a book lies in its being read.

  Umberto Eco

  Lying, Book

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• Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Writing, Choices, Style

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

  Umberto Eco

  Fear, Humility, Religion

  Umberto Eco (1995). “Name of the Rose”, p.503, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If you hand an adult a lump of clay, they're likely to respond by fashioning something representative out of the raw material. For the most part, they'll simply forge an object that signifies something "real" in the world, even if that something is as abstract as an emotion or an energy. A child, on the other hand, will just as often produce something totally without semiotic meaning, a shape or a mass that represents nothing that exists outside of their imagination. Or else, they'll eat it or throw it or ignore it, wholesale.

  Keith Murray

  Children, Real, Hands

  "Keith Murray of We Are Scientists: Examining Life with Humor". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

  Helen Vendler

  Art, Play, Utterance

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• I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.

  Ira Glass

  Art, Book, Challenges

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I am really interested in who owns ideas of religion. What if I say I'm a libertarian, socialist, Occupy-supporting, anti-war, Christian? Is that a controversial idea? I don't see anything really in the original semiotics of Christianity, in the specific parable of the radical socialist Jew from Galilee who becomes the hero figure in the Homeric-word-of-mouth-gossip-novel that becomes the Bible that should make that a paradox.

  Robert Montgomery

  Christian, War, Hero

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Method helps intuition when it is not transformed into dictatorship. Intuition augments method if it does not instill anarchy. In every moment of our semiotic existence, method and intuition complement one another.

  Mihai Nadin

  Intuition, Doe, Anarchy

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• As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If it I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant.

  Jerome Rothenberg

  Sex, Taken, College

  Jerome Rothenberg (1981). “Pre-faces & Other Writings”, p.36, New Directions Publishing

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• Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don't agree with. It doesn't serve us well.

  Naomi Wolf

  Eye, Yale, People

  "NEWS & POLITICS Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism -- Is She Onto Something or in Fantasy Land?". Interview with Justine Sharrock, www.alternet.org. March 29, 2010.

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• For photography to be an art involves reformulating notions of art, rejecting both material and formal purism and also the separation of art from commerce as distinct semiotic practices that never interlock.

  Peter Wollen

  Photography, Art, Practice

  Peter Wollen (1982). “Readings and writings: semiotic counter-strategies”, New Left Books

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• 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

  Reading, Men, Hands

  "The Marriage Plot: A Novel". Book by Jeffrey Eugenides, 2011.

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