Ferdinand de Saussure Quotes

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

Memory works according to meaning, and when something is important to you, the Google in your brain brings it forward all of a sudden.

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

It's what you do every time. You isolate what you know, and you create a mental image of what you're doing. Every time you speak you don't have to think about it. Words come out of your mouth based on what you know. That's the same job every time.

The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.

Will is nothing more than a particular case of the general doctrine of association of ideas, and therefore a perfectly mechanical thing.

For an average noun or an average verb, an average mind can quickly create reference. Where did they hear it? See it? What does it remind them of? What is its connection? When was it last used in conversation? What has been my experience with it? A host of memories appear when you hear a word you remember.

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.

Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

We don't really understand something until we have forgotten it.

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

I carried recipes in my head like maps.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe.

That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

I'd say I dream in Esperanto. Sometimes I remember some dreams in another language, but dreaming in languages no, but figures yes, my psychology is this way.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.