top of page
.png){kind=small}
"In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Language quotes
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
"Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music."
"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."
Explore more quotes by Jacques Lacan
"What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?"
"As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension."
"Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters."
"Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there."
"Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it."
"For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence."
"Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly."
"The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible."
"But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially."
bottom of page