Symbolic Interaction Quotes

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,' said the dewdrop to the lake.

Human communication, 'as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols' it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

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

After a while he played with the pencil and the paper again and was delighted when he discovered how to make a mark with the one on the other. Various noises continued outside, but he didn't know whether they were real or not. He then talked to his table for a week to see how it would react.

The relationship between critic and writer is similar to the one between the pigeon and the statue.