Henri Matisse 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.

An object never serves the same function as its image - or its name.

The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention.

It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

I think the purpose of deconstruction is to take something apart and see how it works. If you're not going to put it back together again and watch it go, what's the point?

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds.

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.

In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.

The function of president in France is one of significant symbolic value; it can't be compared with that of prime minister or cabinet member. Everything you do, everything you say - but also what you don't say - suddenly has meaning. That might sound quite formidable or even stressful, but I think it is a product of the history of this role.

Information...exhausts itself in the staging of meaning...[and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy

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 signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.